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V .\ 



THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

F. TENNYSON JESSE 



it 



Women are timid, cower and shrink 
At show of danger, some folk think; 
But men there are who for their lives 
Dare not so far asperse their wives. 
We let that pass — so much is clear. 
Though little dangers they may fear. 
When greater dangers men environ, 
Then women show a front of iron; 
And, gentle in their manner, they 
Do bold things in a quiet way." 

Thomas Dunn English. 



u 




A '"^faxy" with the aerial torpedo dropped ikto 

THE CAMP 



THE SWO RD 
OF DEBORAH 

FIRST-HAND IMPRESSIONS OF THE 
BRITISH WOMEN'S ARMY IN FRANCE 



BY 
F. TENNYSON JESSE 

AUTHOR OF "SECEET BREAD," "THE MILKY WAY," ETC. 




NEW y^SJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



-b"^ 



:3i^;^^ 



Copyright, iQiQt 
By George H. Doran Company 



Printed in the United States of America 
©CI.A53 354 

JUL 25 I9!9 



FOREWORD 

This little book was written at the request of 
e Ministry of Information in March of 19 18; 

was only released for publication — in spite of 
e need for haste in its compiling which had been 
ipressed on me, and with which I had complied 
-shortly before Christmas. Hence it may seem 
►mewhat after the fair. But it appears to me 
lat people should still be told about the workers 
: the war and what they did, even now when we 
■e all struggling back into our chiffons — perhaps 
ore now than ever. For we should not forget, 
id how should we remember if we have never 
lown ?j 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A.B.C. 13 

II The Fever Chart of War .... 17 

III Backgrounds 26 

ilV My First Convoy ....... 34 

• V Outposts 41 

VI Waacs: Rumours and Realities . . 48 

VII The Brown Graves 58 

VIII Vignettes 65 

IX Evening 74 

X Night . 84 

XI "And the Bright Eyes or Danger" . 93 

XII Rest 102 

XIII General Servants and a General 

Question iii 

XIV Notes and Queries . . . ". . . 123 



vn 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

A "Fanny" with the Aerial Torpedo 

Dropped into the Camp .... Frontispiece 

PAGE 

H. M. The Queen Inspecting a Vad Domestic 
Staff 48 

A Vad Motor Convoy 48 

Waac Gardeners at Work in the Cemetery . 48 

Wreaths from Mothers of the Fallen . . 48 

Waacs in the Bakery 80 

Waac Cooks Preparing Vegetables ... 80 

Waac Encampment Protected by Sand Bags . 80 



iz 



THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 



"Thou art an Amazon, and fightest with 
the sword of Deborah" 

— I Henry VI. i. ii. 



THE 

SWORD OF DEBORAH 

CHAPTER I 

A*B«C* 

This world of Initials ... in which the mem- 
bers of the British Expeditionary Force live and 
move — it is a bewildering place for the outsider. 
Particularly to one who, like the writer, has never 
been able to think in initials, any more than in 
dates or figures. The members of the B.E.F. — 
and that at least is a set of letters that conveys 
something to all of us — not only live amidst 
initials, but are themselves embodied initials. To 
them the string of letters they reel off is no mean- 
ingless form, no mere abracadabra to impress the 
supplicant, but each is a living thing, coloured, defi- 
nitely patterned, standing for something in flesh 
and blood, or stone and mortar ; something concrete 
and present to the mind's eye at the mere mention. 

Just as, to anyone who does not know New 
York, it seems as though all the streets must sound 
exactly alike, being merely numbered, while, to 
anyone who knows them, the words East Sixty 

13 



U THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

First, say, are as distinct from East Twenty First, 
distinct with a whole vivid personality of their 
own, as Half Moon Street from Thread^eedle 
Street — so, to the initiate in the game, the setters 
so lightly rattled off to designate this or that 
official or institution stand for vivid, real, colour- 
able things. 

But at first one is reminded forcibly of that 
scene in "Anna Karenina" where Levin proposes 
to Kitty for the second time by means of writing 
in chalk on a table the letters *'W, y, t, m, i, c, n, 
b, d, t, m, n, o, t," and Kitty, with great intelli- 
gence, guesses that they mean *'When you told me 
it could never be, did that mean never, or then?'^ 
Kitty, if you remember, replies in initials at almost 
equal length, and Levin displays an intelligence 
equal to hers. I had always found that scene 
hard of credence, but I have come to the con- 
clusion that Levin and Kitty would have been 
invaluable at H.Q.B.R.C.S., A.P.O. 3, B.E.F. 

And the fog of initials is symbolic in a double 
manner; for not only do the initials stand for what 
they represent to those who know, but in their 
very lack of meaning for those who do not, they 
typify with a peculiar aptness the fact that after 
all we at home in England, particularly we ladies 
of England who live at home in ease, know very 
little indeed of even what the letters B.E.F. stand 
for. We have hazy ideas on the subject. Vaguely 
we know, for instance, that there are women, lots 



A.B.C. 15 

of women, working out In France, though quite 
at what, beyond nursing, we don't seem to know. 
Motor drivers ... of course, yes, we have heard 
of th^m. There Is a vague impression that they 
are having the time of their lives, probably being 
quite useful too . . . but of the technique of the 
thing, so to speak, what do we know? About as 
much as we know when we first hear the clouds of 
Initials rattling like shrapnel about our heads if 
we go over to France. 

And If we at home know so little, how can 
other countries know, who have no inner working 
knowledge of English temperaments and training 
to go upon as a rough guide to at least the prob- 
able trend of things? How can we expect them 
to know? And yet knowledge of what every sec- 
tion of the working community Is doing was never 
so vital as at the present moment, because never 
before has so much of the world been working 
together on the same job — and the biggest job In 
history. 

It Is always a good thing to know what other 
folk are doing, even when they are not your sort, 
and what they are doing does not affect you, be- 
cause It teaches proportion and widens vision — 
how much more important, then, when what they 
are doing Is what you are doing too, or what you 
may yet come to do ? 

Gentle reader — and even more especially un- 
gentle reader — If In these pages I occasionally 



16 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

ask you to listen to my own personal confession 
both of faith and of unfaith — ^please realise that 
it is not because I imagine there is any particular 
interest in my way of seeing things, but simply 
because it is only so that I can make you see them 
too. You are looking through my window, that 
is all, and it is not even a window that I opened 
for myself, but that had to be opened for m«. If 
you will realise that I went and saw all I did see, 
not as myself, but as you, it will give you the 
idea I am wishful to convey to you. Anything 
I feel is only valuable because my feeling of it 
may mean your feeling of it too. Therefore, 
when you read "I" in these pages, don't say 
"Here's this person talking of herself again . . ." 
say "Here am I, myself. This person only saw 
these things so that I should see them." 

If you don't it will be nine-tenths my fault and 
one-tenth your own. 

Just as all the apparently endless combinations 
of initials in France are symbols of living realities 
to those who understand them, and of their igno- 
rance to those who don't just as the very heading 
of "A.B.C." which I have given this chapter 
typifies both those combinations of initials and the 
fact that you and I are beginning at the very 
beginning — for no one could have been more 
blankly ignorant than I when I went over to 
France — so the letter "I" whenever it occurs in 
this book is a symbol for You. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FEVER CHART OE WAR 

*ThE women are splendid . . ," How tired 
we are of hearing that, so tired that we begin to 
doubt it, and the least hostile emotion that it 
evokes is the sense that after all the men are so 
much more splendid, so far beyond praise, that 
the less one says of anyone else the better. That 
sentence is dead, let us hope, fallen into the same 
limbo as "Business as UsuaP* and the rest of the 
early war-gags, but the prejudices it aroused, the 
feeling of boredom, have not all died with it. 
Words have at least this in common with men, 
that the evil that they do lives after them. 

Let me admit that when those in authority sent 
for me to go to France and see what certain sec- 
tions of the women there were doing, I didn't 
want to go. I told them rather ungraciously that 
if they wanted the **sunny-haired-lassies-in-khaki- 
touch" they had better send somebody else. I am 
not, and never have been, a feminist or any other 
sort of an 'ist, never having been able to divide 
humanity into two different classes labelled "men" 
and "women." Also, to tell the truth, the idea of 

17 



18 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

going so far behind the lines did not appeal. 
For this there Is the excuse that in England one 
grows so sick of the people who talk of "going to 
the Front'* when they mean going to some safe 
chateau as a base for a personally conducted tour, 
or — Conscientious objectors are the worst sinners 
in this latter class — when they are going to sit 
at canteens or paint huts a hundred miles or so 
behind the last line of trenches. The reaction 
from this sort of thing is very apt to make one 
say: "Oh, France? There's no more in being 
in France behind the lines than in working in Eng- 
land." A point of view in which I was utterly 
and completely wrong. There is a great deal of 
difference, not in any increased danger, but in 
quite other ways, as I shall show in the place and 
order In which it was gradually made apparent 
to me. 

Also, no one who has not been at the war knows 
the hideous boredom of it ... a boredom that 
the soul dreads like a fatal miasma. And if I had 
felt it In Belgium In those terrible grey first weeks 
of her pain, when at least one was in the midst of 
war, as It was then, still fluid and mobile, still full 
of alarums and excursions, with all the suffering 
and death immediately under one's eyes still a new 
thing; if I had felt it again, even more strongly, 
when I went right up to the very back of the 
front In the French war zone for the Croix Rouge, 
in those poor little hospitals where the stretchers 



THE FEVER CHART OF WAR 19 

are always ready In the wards to hustle the 
wounded away, and where, in devastated land only 
lately vacated by the Germans, I sat and ate with 
peasants who were painfully and sadly beginning 
to return to their ruined homes and cultivate again 
a soil that might have been expected to redden the 
ploughshare, how much the more then might I 
dread it, caught in the web of Lines of Communi- 
cation. ... I feared that boredom. 

And there was another reason, both for my dis- 
inclination and my lack of interest. We in Eng- 
land grew so tired, in the early days of the war, 
of the fancy uniforms that burst out upon women. 
Every other girl one met had an attack of khaki- 
itis, was spotted as the pard with badges and 
striped as the zebra. Almost simultaneously with 
this eruption came, for the other section of the 
feminine community, reaction from it. We others 
became rather self-consciously proud of our fem- 
ininity, of being "fluffy" — in much the same way 
that anti-suffragists used to be fluffy when they 
said they preferred to influence a man's vote, and 
that they thought more was done by charm. . . . 

With oflUcial recognition of bodies such as the 
V.A.D.'s and the even more epoch-making official 
founding of the W.A.A.C.'s, the point of view 
of the un-uniformed changed. The thing was no 
longer a game at which women were making silly 
asses of themselves and pretending to be men; it 
had become regular, ordered, disciplined and 



W THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

worthy of respecL In short, uniform was no 
longer fanqr dress. 

But the feeling of boredom that had been en- 
gendered stayed on, as these things do. It is yet 
to be found, partly because there still are women 
who have their photographs taken in a new uni- 
form every week, but more because of our igno- 
rance as to what the real workers are doing. And 
like most ignorant people, I was happy in my 
ignorance. 

Well, I went, and am most thankful for my 
prejudice, my disinclination, my prevision of bore- 
dom. For without all those, what would my con- 
version be worth? Who, already convinced of 
religion, is amazed at attaining salvation? It is 
to the mocker that the miracle is a miracle, and 
no mere expected sequence of nature, divine or 
human. 

I was often depressed, the wherefore of which 
you will see, but bored, never. Thrilled, ashamed 
for oneself that one does so little — admiring, crit- 
ical, amused, depressed, elated, all this gamut 
and its gradations were touched, but the string of 
boredom, never. And the only thing that worries 
anyone sent on such a quest as mine, and with 
the inevitable message to deliver at the end of 
it, is that terrible feeling that no matter how 
really one feels enthusiasm, how genuine one's 
conversion, there will always be the murmur of 
— "Oh, yes. ... Of course she has to say all that 



THE FEVER 'CHART OF WAR 21 

• . .- it^s all part of the propaganda. She was 
sent to do it and she has to do It, whether she 
really believes in it or not. . . ." 

What can one say? I can only tell you, O Su- 
perior Person, that no matter what I had been 
sent to do and told to write I not only wouldn't 
but couldn't have, unless I meant it. I can only 
tell you so, I can't make you believe it. But let 
me also assure you that I too am — or shall I say 
was? — Superior, that I too have laughed the 
laugh of sophistication at enthusiasm, that I too 
know enough to consider vehemence amusing and 
strenuous effort ill-bred, that doubtless I shall do 
so again. But there is one thing that seems to me 
more ill-bred, and that is lack of appreciation of 
those who are doing better than oneself. 

Lest you should misunderstand me when I say 
that I didn't want to go to France this time, and 
feared boredom, and felt no particular interest 
in the work of the women over there, let me add 
that I was careful to sponge my mind free of all 
preconceived notions, either for or against, when 
once it was settled that I should go. I went with- 
out enthusiasm, it is true, but at least I went with 
a mind rigorously swept and garnished, so that 
there might enter into it visitants of either kind, 
angelic or otherwise. 

For this has always seemed to me in common 
honesty a necessary part of equipment to anyone 
going on a special mission, charged with finding 



22' JHE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

out things as they are — ^to be free not only of 
prejudice against, but predisposition for; and just 
as a juryman, when he is empanelled, should try 
and sweep his mind bare of everything he has 
heard about the case before, so should the Spe- 
cial Missioner — ^to coin a most horrible phrase — 
make his mind at once blank and sensitised, like 
a photographic plate, for events to strike as truly 
as they may, with as little help or hindrance from 
former knowledge as possible. 

Human nature being what it is, it is probably 
almost impossible for the original attitude to be 
completely erased, however conscientious one is, 
and that is why I am glad that my former atti- 
tude was, if not inimical, at least very unenthusias- 
tic, so that I am clear of the charge of seeing 
things as I or the authorities might have wished 
me to see them. i 

And, for the first few days, as always when 
the mind is plunged headlong into a new world, 
though I saw facts, listened to them, was Im- 
pressed, very impressed, by their outward show, 
it still remained outward show, the soul that In- 
formed the whole evaded me, and for many days 
I saw things that I only understood later in view 
of subsequent knowledge, when I could look back 
and see more clearly with the mind's eye what I 
before had seen with the physical. Yet even 
the first evening I saw something which, though 



THE FEVEH CHART OF WAR 23 

only dimly, showed me a hint of the spirit of the 
whole. 

I was at the Headquarters of the British Red 
Cross — which is what the letters H.Q.B.R.C.S. 
stand for — and I was being shown some very pe- 
culiar and wonderful charts. They are secret 
charts, the figures on which, if a man is shown 
them, he must never disclose, and those figures, 
when you read them, bring a contraction at once 
of pity and of pride to the heart. For, on these 
great charts, that are mapped out into squares 
and look exactly^ like temperature charts at a hos- 
pital, are drawn curves, like the curves that show 
the fever of a patient. Up in jagged mountains, 
down into merciful valleys, goes the line, and at 
every point there is a number, and that number is 
the number of the wounded who were brought 
down from the trenches on such a day. Here, on 
these charts. Is a complete record, In curves, of the 
rate of the war. Every peak Is an offensive, every 
valley a comparative lull. 

Sheet after sheet, all with those carefully-drawn 
numbered curves zigzagging across them, all show- 
ing the very temperature of War. . . , 

With this difference — that on these sheets there 
Is no "normal." War Is abnormal, and there is 
not a point of these charts where, when the line 
touches It, you can say — "It Is well." 

As I looked at these records I began to get a 
different vision of that tract of country called 



M THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

"Lines of Communication'' which I had come to 
see. This, where War's very pulse was noted day 
by day, was the stronghold of War himself. Here 
he is nursed, rested, fed with food for the mouths 
of flesh and blood, and food for the mouths of 
iron ; here, the whole time, night and day, as 
ceaselessly as in the trenches, the work goes on, 
the work of strengthening his hands, and so every 
man and woman working for that end in *'L. of 
C." is fighting on our side most surely. Something 
of the hugeness and the importance of it began 
to show itself. 

And, as regards that particular portion which I 
had come out to see, I began to get a glimmering 
of that also, when it was told me, that of those 
thousands of wounded I saw marked on the charts, 
a great proportion was convoyed entirely by 
women. There are whole districts, such as the 
Calais district, which includes many towns and 
stations, where every ambulance running is driven 
by a woman. Not only the fever rate of War is 
shown on those charts, but just as to the seeing 
eye, behind any temperature-chart in a hospital, 
is the whole construction of the great scheme-— 
doctors, surgeons, nurses, food, drugs, money, de- 
votion, everything that finds its expression, in that 
simple sheet of paper filled in daily as a matter of 
routine, so behind these charts of War's tempera- 
ture kept at H.Q. is the whole of the complex or- 
ganisation known as the British Red Cross. And 



THE FEVER CHART OF WAR 25 

outstanding even amongst so much that is splendid 
are certain bands of girls behind the lines, who, 
not for a month or two, but year in, year out, dur- 
ing nights and days when they have known no 
rest, have they, also, had their fingers on the 
pulse of Kar^ 



CHAPTER III 

BACKGROUNDS 

At H.Q.B.R.C.S. the D. of T. told me the 
first things for me to see were the F.A.N.Y.'s 
and the G.S.V.A.D.'s. That is the sort of sen- 
tence that was shot at me on my first day. I have 
told you what H.Q.B.R.C.S. means; the D. of T. 
means Director of Transport; the F.A.N. Y. Is the 
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and the G.S.V.A.D. 
is the General Service Voluntary Aid Detachment. 
Now the V.A.D. I had heard of, and of Its mem- 
bers, always called V.A.D.'s, but G.S.V.A.D. was 
something new to me. Yet the Importance of 
the distinction, I soon learned, was great. 

Four sets of Initials represented my chief ob- 
jectives in France, the F.A.N.Y.'s, the V.A.D.'s, 
the G.S.V.A.D.'s, and the W.A.A.C.'s. Of these 
the former are known as the Fannies, and the last 
named as the Waacs, owing to the tendency of 
the eye to make out of any possible combination 
of letters a word that appeals to the ear. Of these 
four bodies, the Fannies and the V.A.D.'s were 
in existence before the war, being amongst those 

"26 ""^ 



BACKGROUNDS ^7 

who listened to the voice of Lord Roberts crying 
in the wilderness. They are all unpaid, voluntary 
workers, and they rank officially as officers. 
Among themselves, of course, they have their 
own officers, but socially, so to speak, every Fanny 
and V.A.D. is ranked with the officers of the 
Army. But with the G.S.V.A.D.'s and the Waacs 
it is not so. They are paid, and are to replace 
men; G.S.V.A.D.'s work in motor convoys and at 
the hospitals, as cooks, dispensers, clerks, etc., 
and the Waacs work for the combatant service. 
Except for their officers, who rank with officers 
of the Army, the members of these two bodies are 
considered as privates. 

And as both the Fannies and the Waacs go in 
khaki, and both the V.A.D.'s and the G.S.V.A.D.'s 
in dark blue, it will be seen that confusion is very 
easy to the uninitiate. That is my only excuse 
for perpetrating the worst blunder that has prob- 
ably ever been committed in France. Taken to 
tea at a Fanny convoy I committed the unspeak- 
able sin of asking whether they were Waacs. . . . 

They were very kind to me about it, but when I 
eventually grasped the system, I saw it was as 
though I had asked a Brass Hat whether he be- 
longed to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told 
the sad tale of my gafe to the members of 
a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it 
must have been quite good for the Fannies . . . 
but somehow it wasn't equally good for them 



^8 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

when I timidly asked whether they were 
G.S.V.A.D.'s . . . though they were also very 
kind to me about it. 

The D. of T. motored me over to the Fannies' 
convoy, on a pale day of difficult sunlight. Is 
there anywhere in the world, I wondered, more 
depressing — more morbid — landscape, than that 
round Calais? It weighs on the soul as a fog 
upon the senses, and it seemed to me that only 
people of such a tenacious gaiety as the French 
or such an independence from environment as the 
British could survive there for long. I have seen 
country far flatter that was yet more wholesome* 
and I loathe flat country. There is something in 
the perpetual repetition of form in the country 
round Calais, the endless sameness of Its differ- 
ences, that is peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies 
blotted with paler clouds, endless rows of bare 
poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yel- 
lowish roads unwinding for ever, acres of un- 
broken and sickly green, of new-turned earth of 
an equally sad brown . . • and over all the trail 
of war, whose footprint is desolation. The oc- 
cupation even of an army of defen<:e means camp 
after camp; tin huts, wooden huts, zinc roofs; 
hospitals; barbed wire; mud. And, amidst all 
this, and the sudden reminders of more active 
warfare in houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble 
by a bomb, there are people working, year in, 



BACKGROUNDS 29 

year out, undismayed by the sordid Utter of 

It. « » 4 I 

The saving of it all to the newcomer, though 
even that must pall on anyone too accustomed, is 
that, like Pater's Monna Lisa, upon this part of 
France "the ends of the world are come" * . . 
(and who shall wonder if in consequence "her eye- 
lids are a little weary"?). Inscrutable China- 
men, silent as shadows, flashing their sudden 
smiles, even more mysterious than their mrmio- 
bility, turned from their labour to watch the pass- 
ing of the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each 
with a white man's vote, voluntarily enlisted for 
the Empire, swung along; vividly dark Portuguese, 
clad in grey, came down to their rest camps ; Bel- 
gians trotted past with their little tassels bobbing 
from their jaunty caps. And, in great droves 
along the roads, or, sometimes, more solitary in 
the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze, 
their English escort shepherding. 

The first time my companion told me we were 
coming on German prisoners, I shut my eyes, de- 
termined to open them unprejudiced, with a vision 
clear of all preconceptions; really, at the bottom 
of my heart, expecting that I should find them ex- 
traordinarily like anyone else . . . But they were 
not. They were all so like each other, that by 
the time you had seen several hundreds you were 
still wondering confusedly whether they were all 
relations . . • even my Western eye detected 



30 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

more difference Between the types of Chinamen 
I met upon the road than In these Teutons. Of 
course, the round brimless cap has something to 
do with It, as has the close hair-crop, but when 
all is said, how much of a type they are, how 
amazingly so, as though they had all been bred 
to one purpose through generations I The out- 
standing ear, placed very low on the wide neck, 
the great development of cheekbones and of the 
jaw on a level with the ears, and then the sudden 
narrowing at the short chin . . . and the florid 
bulkiness of them. A detachment of poilus 
swung past in their horizon blue, and what a 
different type was flashed up against that back- 
ground of square jowls, what a thin, nervous, 
wiry type, all animation. ... 

The Germans were so exactly like all the photo- 
graphs of prisoners one has seen in the daily 
papers that it was quite satisfying; I remember 
the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going 
to New England I saw a frame house „and an old 
man with a goatee beard driving a spider-wheeled 
buggy, exactly like an illustration out of 
Harper^s. ... 

All of which — with the exception of the old 
man out of Harpe/s — is not as irrelevant as it 
may appear, in fact, Is not irrelevant at all, for 
It is these things, this landscape, these varied races, 
this whole atmosphere, which goes to make life's 
background for everyone quartered hereabouts. 



BACKGROUNDS SI 

and it is the background which, especially to mem- 
ory in after years, makes so great a part of the 
whole. 

As we went, remember, I still knew nothing 
about the work I had come out to see or the lives 
of those employed in it, I could only watch flash- 
ing past me the outward setting of those lives, and 
try, from the remarks of my companion, to build 
up something else. Yet what I built up from him, 
as what I had built up from the talk at my hotel 
the night before, was more the attitude of the men 
towards the women than the attitude of the women 
towards their life, though it was none the less 
interesting for that. And here I may as well 
record, what I found at the beginning — and I saw 
no reason to reverse my judgment later on — and 
that was no trace of sex-jealousy In any depart- 
ment whatsoever. I only met genuine unemo- 
tional, level-headed admiration on the part of the 
men towards the women working amongst them. 
The D. of T. was no exception, and opined that 
if the war hadn't done anything else, at least it 
had killed that irritating masculine "gag'* that 
women couldn't work together. For that, after 
all, will always be to some minds the surprise of 
the thing — ^not that women can work with men, 
but that they can work together. 

"People talk a lot," he said reflectively, "about 
what's to happen after the war . . . when it's all 
over and there's nothing left but to go home. 



32 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

What's going to happen to all these girls, how 
will they settle down?" 

'*And how do you think . . . ?" 

"I don't think there'll be any trouble whether 
they marry or not. They will have had their 
adventure." 

I looked at him and thought what a penetrat- 
ing remark that was. Later, in view of what I 
came to think and be told, I wondered whether 
it were true after all; later still came to what 
seems to me the solution of it, or as much of a 
solution as that can be which still leaves one with 
an "I wonder. ..." 

He told me tales of the Fannies who, being 
now under the Red Cross, came directly under 
his jurisdiction. He told me of a lonely outpost 
at the beginning of the war where there was only 
one surgeon and two Fannies, and how for twenty- 
four hours they all three worked, "up to the knees 
in blood," amputating, tying up, bandaging, with- 
out rest or relief. How the whole of the work 
of the convoying of wounded for the enormous 
Calais district was done entirely by the girls, of 
how, at this particular Fanny convoy to which 
we were going, they were raided practically every 
fine night, and that their camp was in about the 
''unhealthiest spot," as regarded raids, in the dis- 
trict. How during the last raid nine aerial torpe- 
does fell around the camp, and exploded, and 
one fell right in the middle and did not explode, 



f 



BACKGROUNDS S3 

or there would have been very little Fanny Con- 
voy left . . . but how it made a hole seven feet 
deep and weighed a hundred and ten pounds and 
stood higher than a stock-size Fanny. And, 
crowning touch of jubilation to the Convoy, of how 
the French authorities had promised to present it 
to them after it was cleaned out and rendered in- 
nocuous, to their no small contentment. As well- 
earned a trophy as ever decorated a mess- 
room. . . . 

He talked very like a nice father about to show 
off his girls and back them against the world. 



CHAPTER lY 

MY FIRST CONVOY 

We arrived on a great day for the Fannies 
— the famous Aerial Torpedo had preceded us by 
a bare hour. There it lay, on the floor of the 
mess-room, reminding me, with its great steel 
fins and long rounded nose, of a dead 
shark. The Commandant showed it us with 
pride, and every successive Fanny entering was 
greeted with the two words — "It's come.'* The 
D. of T. swore he would have it mounted on 
a brass and mahogany stand with an engraved 
plate to tell its history. Two strong Fannies 
reared it up, for even empty its weight was note- 
worthy, and it stood on its murderous nose with 
its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent 
and crumpled like a sheet of paper, above my 
head. A great trophy, and a hard-earned one. 

This was the first camp I saw, and a very good 
one as camps go. (I merely add that latter sen- 
tence because personally I think any form of com- 
munity life the most terrible of hardships.) It is 
rather pathetic to see how, in all the camps in 
France, the girls have managed to get not only as 

34J 



MY FIRST CONVOY 35 

individual but as feminine touches as possible. I 
never saw a woman's office anywhere in France 
that was not a mass of flowers ; and window-boxes, 
flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated every- 
where. Every office, too, though strictly business- 
like, has chintz curtains of lovely colours. You 
can always tell a woman's office from a man's, 
which is a good sign, and should hearten the pessi- 
mists who cry that this doing of men's work will 
de-feminise the women. 

The Commandant at this Fannies' camp took 
me into her office, and she and the D. of T. — 
who chimed in whenever he thought she was not 
saying enough in praise of his admired Fannies 
— told me the rough outlines of the history of the 
body since the beginning of the war. Though 
now affihated to the Red Cross, they were an 
independent body before the war, and when hos- 
tilities broke out were a mounted corps, with horse 
ambulances. They offered themselves to the Eng- 
lish authorities, were refused, and came out to 
the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for 
fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais 
staffed by themselves for nurses and with Belgian 
doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of 
19 16 they offered to drive motor ambulances and 
thus release Red Cross men drivers, and now they 
are running, with the exception of two ambu- 
lances for Chinese, the whole of the Calais dis- 
trict, and have released many A.S.C. men as well. 



86 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

It is a big area, with many outlying camps where 
there are detached units. As a rule, there is only 
one girl to each ambulance, but in very lonely 
spots the allowance is three girls to two cars. At 
St. Omer the authorities at first objected to having 
them, but now they have taken over the whole of 
the Red Cross and A.S.C. ambulances there. 

At this camp that I saw, they have no day or 
night shifts, as there is not much night work 
except during a push, when everyone works night 
and day without more than a couple of hours* 
sleep snatched with clothes on — indeed, I heard 
of a convoy where for a fortnight the girls never 
took off their clothes, but just kept on with frag- 
mentary rests. The other occasion when there is 
night work is when there is a raid. As I have 
said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot 
for bombs, and until just lately the girls had no 
raid-shelter. Now one has been dug for them, 
roofed with concrete and sandbags and earth, 
which would stand anything short of a direct hit 
from some such pleasant little missile as is now the 
pride of the camp. 

But at first, even when the raid-shelter was built, 
there was no telephone extension to it from the 
office, and therefore the Commandant had to stay 
in the office with one other to take the telephone 
calls, then had to cross the open, in full raid, and 
going to the mouth of the shelter call out the 
names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the 



MY FIRST CONVOY 37 

ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the 
spirit of the girls, that never once, through all 
the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always 
answered to her name and came coolly and uncon- 
cernedly up the steps and went across to her car. 
But it seemed to me that it was as good to sit 
quietly in a matchboard office and await the mes- 
sages, to say nothing of taking them across that 
danger zone. Now an order has gone forth that 
the ambulances are not to start till the raid is over, 
as they are too precious to be risked. 

It is not a bad record, this continuous service of 
the Fannies since the outbreak of war, is it? 

For remember it is not work that can be taken 
up and dropped. You sign on for six months at 
a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in 
the year. And the girls sign on, again and again ; 
they are nearly all veterans at it. And, comfort- 
able as the camp has been made — all the necessi- 
ties of life are provided by the War Office and 
the *'frills" by the Red Cross — and in spite of the 
tiny separate cubicles — greatest blessing of all — 
decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of every- 
thing that can be done to make the girls happy 
and keep them well — it is still a picnic. And a 
picnic may be all very well for a week or even 
a fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years 
is not at all the same thing. . . . 

Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are 
all very well. Girls who go out rather delicate 



38 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

soon become strong in the hard open air life, and 
there has not been a single case of strain from 
working the heavy ambulances. The girls do all 
cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves, and 
all repairs with the exception of the very compli- 
cated cases, for which they are allowed to call on 
the help of two mechanics, but only after the re- 
quest has gone through those in authority. 

The domestic staff, with the exception of one 
Frenchwoman in the kitchen, is supplied by the 
girls themselves, and on this subject of domestic 
staffs in France I shall say more later. Their 
food is Army rations, which are excellent, as I can 
testify after straitened England — supplemented by 
milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross 
gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, 
etc. 

When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a 
lordly dish and was told to take as much as I 
liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment. 
There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about 
the Fannies, and at this camp the Commandant 
was known as "Boss,'' a respectful familiarity I 
did not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent 
soul had even inscribed it on the door of her 
cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, 
all over the place ; even the bath-room is not sacred 
to them. It is a pathetic sight, that bath-room 
of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after 
I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. 



MY FIRST CONVOY 39 

The Fannies have a limited and capricious water 
supply, and their bath Is so small as to remove 
forcibly the temptation for one person to use It 
all up. Perched on two stalks of stone stands 
a long bath in miniature, long enough to sit In 
with the knees up, but of no known human size. 
Inscribed above it — (under a fresco in black and 
white of cats in the moonlight) — are these touch- 
ing words: "Do not turn on the hot water when 
the cold is off or the Boiler will Bust." 

Everything I have been saying and describing 
is external, I know, but you see I was still grasp- 
ing at externals, though underneath certain things 
were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring 
myself to voice anything I was wondering to these 
splendid strangers ; later, though I never was with 
any one convoy more than a night, still I got the 
feeling that seeing so many of them had made me 
more familiar with the ones I happened to be with 
at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the 
point and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. 
Kipling would say, is another story. 

We drove away in the windy evening, past the 
parked rows of great glossy ambulances, and I 
bore with me chiefly an Impression of gaiety, of 
a set purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour 
and that knack of making the best of everything 
which community life engenders when it does not 
do exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that 
might have been bare but were decked with pic- 



40 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

tures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions; 
and above all, I took an impression of a certain 
quality that I can only describe as "stark" in the 
girls, though that is too bleak a word for what I 
mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that per- 
vades their look and their outlook, that spiritually 
works itself out in this determined sticking at the 
job, this avoidance of any emotion that interferes 
with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a 
disregard for appearances that one would never 
have thought to find in human woman. It leaves 
you gasping. They come in, windblown, red- 
dened, hot with exertion, after recklessly abandon- 
ing their hands to all the harsh treatment of a 
car — ^the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, 
and every girl driving a car makes it — ^they come 
in, toss their caps down, brush their hair back 
from their brow in the one gesture that no woman 
has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover 
— and they don't mind. 

It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, 
but of course it is partly explained by the fact 
that the natural tendency in young things would 
be to accentuate anything of that kind once It was 
discovered . . . and for the rest — I really think 
they are too intent on what they are doing and 
care too little about themselves or what anyone 
may be thinking of them. What a blessed free- 
dom I . . . This at last is what it is to be as free 
as a man. 



CHAPTER V 

OUTPOSTS 

It is a matter of temperament whether com- 
munity life, with its enforced lack of individ- 
ualism, or the intense refraction engendered 
by the fact of two people only living together in 
a solitude, is the more trying. In the former 
state one may hope to attain isolation from the 
very superabundance of personalities all around, 
but for the latter there is at least this to be said, 
that if the two feel like leaving each other alone 
there is no distraction of noise and presences. 
Either is a test to persons who are sensitive about 
their right to solitude, a greater one than to those 
who mix happily with their fellow humans. Both 
are to be found in their best expression among the 
English girls in France. From the Fanny convoy 
to a lonely rest station was a change that set me 
thinking over the problem, a problem in which I 
was a mere observer, but which all these girls 
had solved each in her different way, doubtless, 
but as far as I could tell, to the nicest hair-fine 
edge of success. 

My first rest station was in an out-of-the-way 

41 



42 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

little place, bleak and treeless, and consisted of 
a wooden hut built alongside the railway line. In 
this hut lived the two V.A.D.'s who ran the show 
— ^which means that they do the cooking for them- 
selves and for the trains which they supplied with 
food, that they dispense medicines for the pa- 
tients who appear daily at sick parade, and give 
first aid to accidents, change dressings if any cases 
on a hospital train need it, feed stretcher-bearers 
and ambulance drivers, whose hours often prevent 
them getting back to billets for regular meals, take 
in nurses who are either arriving or leaving by 
a night train and would otherwise have nowhere 
to go, and in their spare time — if you can imagine 
them having any — grow their own vegetables, and 
make bandages, pillows, and other supplies for the 
troops. Just two girls, voluntary unpaid work- 
ers, who are nurses, needle-women, doctors, chem- 
ists, gardeners and general servants, and whose 
work can never be done, or, when done, has to 
begin at once all over again. No recreation ex- 
cept what they find in books and themselves, 
nowhere to go, and that perpetual silhouette of 
railway trucks and the hard edge of station roof 
out of the window, of shabby houses and their own 
tiny yar'd at the back, the noise of shunting and 
train whistling in their ears night and day, and 
with it all — worst touch of the lot — to have to do 
their own work for themselves. 

To slave for others all day as long as you can 



OUTPOSTS 43 

come in and find things ready for you at night — 
your hot cocoa In Its cup and your hot-water bag 
— that great consolation of the women members 
of the B.E.F. — In your bed, Is endurable. But 
to come In and have no cocoa If you don't make 
it yourself, no bag If you don't see to It — ^that Is 
a different affair, and that Is where these two 
girls seemed to me to touch a point that of neces- 
sity the others I had seen did not. And now that 
women are doing men's work it Is to be supposed 
they have found out the value of meals and no 
longer look on an egg with one's tea as the great- 
est height to which nourishment need rise, and 
hence have honourably to set about cooking for 
themselves — and there is no woman but will un- 
derstand the boredom of that — ^the rations that a 
paternal army insists on showering upon them. 
Under such circumstances to work Is human, but 
to eat divine. 

As I stepped out of the car at the door, feel- 
ing terribly impertinent at this rolling round In 
luxury to gaze at the work of my betters, one of 
the V.A.D.'s came to the door of the shanty to 
greet us. She was a fair creature, with windblown 
yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident had 
placed exactly like an old-time patch upon the 
curve of one flushed cheek. She was wrapped 
In a big pinafore of butcher blue, and explained 
that she was ^'cleaning up." 

It all looked very clean to me, certainly the 



44 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

little dispensary, the room Into which you firsf 
walked, was spotless, everything ranged ready for 
Sick Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining 
In the shaft of sunlight which came palely In at 
the open doorway. To the left was the kitchen, 
stone-floored, fitted with an English stove, to the 
right the tiny slip of sitting-room from which 
opened the two still narrower little bedrooms. 
That was all. 

This is the atmosphere in which the two girls 
live, but, as usual, they have done everything that 
Is possible with It. Brilliant curtains, pictures, 
rows of books^ — ^the rest stations keep up a sort of 
circulating library, exchanging their books from 
time to time amongst themselves by way of the 
ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a 
library also — and charming pottery ranged along 
the shelves. The rest stations rather make a 
point of their pottery. It Is their tradition always 
to drink out of bowls instead of cups, and their 
plates have the triumphant Gallic cock. In bravery 
of prismatic plumage, striding across them. 

After I had said good-bye to the golden girl 
of the Inspired smut, I went on to a bigger rest 
station at a terminus and was In time to lunch 
there. It was a more sophisticated affair than 
that which I had left, yet when this rest station 
was started, at the beginning of the war, Its habi- 
tation was a railway truck — for the romance of 
which some of those who were there In that first 



OUTPOSTS 3i5 

rush, when you were never off your feet for 
twenty-four hours at a time, sometimes sigh. . . 

Now part of the station buildings has been par- 
titioned off for them, and there is a fairly big 
dispensary, with a bed for dressings and accident 
cases, of which quite a number are brought in, a 
kitchen, a little dining-room where all the furni- 
ture is home-made — deep chairs out of barrels and 
the like — and behind that a big storeroom, 
crammed from floor to ceiling with stores. The 
girls do not sleep here, but in billets at the town, 
but they have to provide meals at any hour and 
meet all the ambulance trains with food and extra 
comforts. 

We had a very good lunch, of stew and onions 
and potatoes, big bowls of steaming coffee, and 
a pudding with raisins, all cooked by one of the 
V.A.D. domestic staff, who always had to slip into 
her place last to eat it, and get out of it first to 
serve the next course. I saw only these two rest 
stations, each typical in its way, the one of the 
Isolated and the other of the central kind, but they 
are scattered up and down the line, varying in 
character according to the needs of the particular 
place. 

At one, for instance, there is a small ward 
attached, where slight cases, not bad enough to 
be admitted to the hospital, and yet requiring some 
attention, can be kept for a day or two, thus 
possibly avoiding serious illness. Near to this 



46 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

same one Is a Labour Battalion, many of the men 
from which are out-patients whose medical inspec- 
tion is held at the rest station. Near another is 
a large convalescent camp, the O.C. of which 
looks to the V.A.D.'s of the rest station for help 
in various ways. 

At them all there is always the work of feed- 
ing the stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, 
who in times of pressure have to spend many 
hours at their work of unloading the trains with- 
out any chance of getting a regular meal. In the 
early days of the rest stations, when the am- 
bulance trains were often merely Improvised, food 
and dressings had to be provided for all the 
wounded on board, but now, when the working of 
the British Red Cross Is as near perfection as 
any human organisation well can be, the men have 
every care taken of them on the perfectly-fitted 
trains. Yet there is much attention given to the 
sick and wounded of every nation who come in on 
the trains, attention chiefly consisting of the giv- 
ing of extra comforts — cocoa, lemons, shirts, slip- 
pers, cigarettes, cushions — and the re-dressing of 
wounds, while a great deal as well as feeding them 
is done for the staffs of the trains, for whom, be- 
sides the lending library, an exchange of gramo- 
phone records and of laundry has been arranged. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about 
the rest stations is that they are one of the few 
points of contact beween the members of the 



OUTPOSTS 47 

B.E.F. and the French population. Our camps, 
our hospitals, our motor convoys, are all little 
Englands in themselves, but every morning to 
the sick parade of these rest stations come not 
only the local V.A.D.'s and ambulance drivers, 
but the French civilian population as well, and 
in greater and greater numbers. Accidents are 
brought to a rest station very often in prefer- 
ence to being taken anywhere else, and anxious 
mothers bring Jean or Marie when a mysterious 
ailment shows itself in untoward spot or sneeze. 
The Gallic cock is more than a decoration as he 
strides across the pottery of the rest stations — 
he is become a symbol as well. 



CHAPTER VI 

WAACS : RUMOURS AND REALITIES 

When I spoke at H.Q. of the depression I 
found In all the landscape around and of its pe- 
culiar morbid quality, nearly everyone assured me 

that I should find the country round E , 

whither I was going, far more depressing. "There 
is nothing but sand dunes and huts, miles of huts, 
hospitals and camps and so on. . . ." It did not 
sound very delightful. 

But to differing vision, differing effects, and 

personally, I loved E ; terrible as cities of 

huts generally are, here they seemed to me to 
have lost much of their terror. I loved the long 
rippling lines of dunes, the decoration of hun- 
dreds of tall pines that came partly against the 
sandy pallor, partly against the vivid steely blue 
of the river beyond, I loved the bare woods we 
passed all along the road, the trees still not per- 
ceptibly misted with buds but giving, with their 
myriads of fine massed twigs, an effect of clouded 
wine-colour. And was there ever such a coun- 
tryside for magpies? Superstition dies before 
their numbers, helpless to count them, so far are 

48 




H. M. THE QUEEX IKSPECTIKG A ' VAD^^ DOMESTIC STAFF 




A V. A. D. MOTOR CONVOY 




WAAC GARDENERS AT WORK IN THE CEMETERY 




WREATHS FROM MOTHERS OF THE FALLEN 



WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES 49 

they beyond the range of sorrow, mirth, mar- 
riage and birth, at any one glance. Everywhere 
through those winey woods there went up, the 
fanlike flutter of black-and-white, the only posi- 
tive notes in all the delicate universe, compact 
of pearly skies, dim purples of earth, and pale 
irradiation of the sun. 

On the roads there was the usual medley of 
the races of the world, added to as we neared 

E by Canadian nurses in streaming white 

veils and uniforms of brilliant blue, and also— 
for surely the most delightful of created bless- 
ings may rank as a race of the world — ^by the 
glossy golden war-dogs, who also have their 
training camp near here, and take their walks 
abroad, waving their plumy tails and jumping 
up on their masters, like any leisured dog at home. 

But — ^^to my sorrow — I was not sent to look at 
war-dogs, and so had to pass by and leave the 
wagging plumes behind. I had several ends in 

view at E ; I had to see the large Waac camp 

there, its outflung ramifications, and the work that 
the Waacs did in the men's camps; and I had to 
see the V.A.D. Motor Convoy, at which I was 
to spend a night. Incidentally, I had high hopes 
of getting permission to go out in an ambulance 
with the latter, though it is against the most sacred 
Army Orders for anyone not in uniform to be 
seen upon an ambulance. Here I may say that 
the permission was granted by a powerful indi- 



50 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

vidual known as the D.D.M.S., though he men- 
tioned that being shot at dawn was the least pain- 
ful thing that ought to happen to me for doing it. 

I was going first to the Waac headquarters, to 
see the Area Controller, who corresponds to an 
Area Commandant in the V.A.D.'s and whose 
rank approximates to that of a Major. She is 
supreme in her area and only the Chief Control- 
ler of the Waacs is above her. Below her are 
her Unit Administrators, who are in charge of 
units and approximate to captains, and have their 
Deputy and Assistant Administrators whom for 
convenience' sake we can classify as lieutenants 
and second lieutenants. 

This is the place to say frankly that I had heard 
— as had we all — **the rumors" that were flying 
round about the Women's Army. They "weren't 
a success," . . . "it had been found to be un- 
workable . . ." and, as reason, a more specific 
charge. Need I say what that specific charge 
was? What is it that always jumps to the mind 
of the average materialist? The most innocent 
thing in the world — in itself — and the cause of 
most of the scandal since the dawn of civilisation. 
A Baby. 

There is a certain type of mind which always 
jumps to babies, apparently looking on them as 
the Churchmen of the Middle Ages looked on 
women — as the crowning touch of evil in an evil 
world. If you remember, there was great agita- 



WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES 51 

tion in certain quarters at the beginning of the 
war, over "War-Babies." They were going to 
inundate the country, they were going to be a very 
serious proposition indeed. The Irish question. 
Conscription, Conscientious Objectors, were going 
to be as nothing to the matter of the War-Babies. 
It is perhaps from some points of view a pity that 
the War-Babies didn't materialize, but that of 
course is another question altogether. "Passons 
oultre," as the great Master of delicate — and 
indelicate — situations used to say. 

The point as regards the Women's Army is that 
the whole of the agitation against it is a libel, and 
one which decent people should be ashamed to cir- 
culate even as supposititious. Quite apart from 
the evidence of my own ears and eyes, at various 
camps I was supplied with the official statistics for 
the Women's Army from March of 19 17 to Feb- 
ruary of 191 8. And of these women who "have 
not been a success," as the mischievous gossip has 
had it, how many do you think have proved fail- 
ures out of six thousand? In the time mentioned 
fourteen have been sent home for incompetence, 
without any slur on their characters ; twenty-three 
for lack of discipline, mostly in the early days 
when the girls did not realise what being in the 
Army meant and thought if they wanted to go to 
any particular place there was no reason why 
they shouldn't; and fifteen who were already 
enceinte before leaving England and which even 



52 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

the most censorious can hardly lay to the charge 
of the B.E.F. And of all that six thousand what 
percentage do you suppose has had to be sent back 
for what Is euphemistically known, I believe, as 
"getting Into trouble," since landing In France? 
No percentage at all. If I may express myself thus 
unmathematlcally, but exactly five cases. Five, 
out of six thousand. Compare that with the 
morality of any village In England, or anywhere 
else In the world, and then say. If you dare to be 
so obviously dishonest, that there is any reason 
why the Women's Army should be aspersed. 

These statistics were given to me at the office 
of the Area Controller, and later repeated at the 
Women's Army H.Q. by the Controller In Chief, 
but on that first sunny morning amongst the pines 
and pale golden sand-dunes It was naturally the 
human and Individual side rather than any of 
figures, however startling, that claimed the mind 
the most For one thing, I had the actual or- 
ganisation and attributes of the Women's Army 
to learn. I knew nothing. The actual working 
knowledge, apart from impressions and things 
learnt only by seeing them, that I gathered dur- 
ing the days I spent at various Waac centres Is 
as follows: 

The Women's Army differs from the F.A.N.Y. 
and the V.A.D. in being a paid instead of a volun- 
tary body. In being directly under the Army, not 
the Red Cross, and in Its members being ranked 



WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES 5B 

as privates. But It also differs from the G.S.V.A. 
D., though that too Is paid and Its members rank 
as privates. The G.S.V.A.D. is far more 
"mixed"; Its members are of all classes and edu- 
cations, and are drafted off for work accordingly, 
but the bulk of the Waacs are working girls and 
do manual labour, such as gardening, cooking, 
baking, scrubbing, etc., though there are amongst 
them girls of a more specialised education who 
are signallers and clerks. The officers, of course, 
are women of education who have undergone a 
stiff training and been carefully selected for the 
posts they fill. For, as will be seen, nearly every- 
thing depends upon the Waac officers; they have 
certainly a greater power for good or harm than 
the officers In the Regular Army, and never were 
1 both the force and danger of personality more 
I acutely Illustrated than in the position of the 
^Waac leaders. 

A Unit Administrator has to know individually 
every girl In her camp, though there may be sev- 
eral hundreds. She has to blend with her abso- 
lute authority a maternal Interest and supervision. 
While she has no power to say whom a girl shall 
or shall not *'walk out" with, she yet makes it her 
business to know what choice of men friends the 
girl makes and to Influence, as far as she can, that 
choice towards discretion. She must not nag but 
must Inculcate by subtle methods a realisation of 
what Is due to the uniform, a sense of the "idea," 



m THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

the ^'symbol/' of It. She does not actually say to 
a girl that she is not to walk arm in arm with a 
Tommy or pin her collar with her paste brooch, 
but she conveys to her that these things are not 
done in the best uniforms . . . And the girl learns 
with Incredible rapidity. A thing Is Not Done- — 
what a potency in those words; in that attitude 
of mind I It probably Influenced the earliest sav- 
ages In the manner of wearing their cowries. 

After all, the whole idea of uniform, of dis- 
tinguishing one caste from another by bits of dif- 
ferent coloured cloth, is based on the Instinct 
for being superior. Was It not John Selden who 
said something to the eifect that our rulers have 
always tried to make themselves as different from 
us as possible ? Of course they have, and it Is ex- 
actly the same thing which the wise Pope Gregory 
Vn had In mind when he definitely crystallised 
the measures for celibacy of the priesthood, and 
It Is exactly the same thing which puts the police- 
man Into a dark blue uniform and a helmet before 
he can so much as stop a milkcart. A policeman 
in plain clothes Is a dethroned monarch. Noth- 
ing In the nature of controlling others was ever 
done without dressing up. The marvel Is that 
for so many centuries the principle should have 
been confined to the masculine sex, when It has 
such an obvious appeal to the feminine. 

This principle when carried a step further and 
applied to those controlled, by giving them also 



WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES 55 

the sensation of being different from the rest of 
the world, results in that spirit called esprit de 
corps, which Is really esprit de tuniforme. To- 
wards the rest of the world the uniformed are 
proud of being different, amongst themselves 
proud of being alike, and the more alike, so to 
speak, the allker. It Is not a thing to treat scorn- 
fully, for it has the whole of symbolism behind 
It. That which makes a man cheerfully die for 
a piece of bunting which, prosaically speaking, is 
only a piece of bunting that happens to be dyed 
red, white, and blue, is part of this same spirit. 
Dull of soul indeed must he be who can look with- 
out a profound emotion on the tattered "colours" 
of a regiment, and yet it is only the idea, the 
symbol, that makes these things what they 
are. • • • 

I And for most of these girls, remember, it is 
the first time they have had a symbol held before 
them. . . . We of the upper classes are brought 
up with many reverences — for our superiors, our 
elders, for traditions, but the classes which for 
want of a better word I must call *'lower"- — so 
please do not cavil at me for doing so or attribute 
false meanings — are for the most part brought up 
to think themselves as good as anyone else, and 
their "rights" the chief thing in life; while owing 
to the unfortunate curriculum of our Board 
Schools, which does not insist nearly enough on 
history as the fount of the present and of all that 



66 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

is great and good in the past, they are left without 
those standards of impersonal enthusiasms and 
Imaginative daring — which should be the right- 
ful Inheritance of us all. 

These girls are now given an abstract Idea to 
live up to, no mere standard of expediency, but 
an Idea that appeals to the imagination. And how 
magnificently they are responding those statistics 
show, but more still does the attitude of all the 
officers and men who have to do with them. I 
talked with all ranks on the subject, and never 
once did I meet with anything but admiration and 
enthusiasm. The men are touchlngly grateful to 
them and value their work and their companion- 
ship. For, very wisely, the girls are encouraged 
to be friends with the men, are allowed to walk 
out with them, to give teas and dances for them 
In the Y.W.C.A. huts, and to go to return parties 
given by the men In the Y.M.C.A. huts. It Is, 
of course, easy to sneer at the ideal which is held 
before the men, of treating these girls as they 
would their sisters, but the fact remains that they 
very beautifully do so. 

Another point to be remembered Is, that, far 
from these girls being exposed to undue tempta- 
tion, the great majority of them have never been 
so well looked after as now. They are mostly 
girls of a class that knows few restrictions, who, 
with the exception of those previously In domestic 
service, have always had what they call their 



WAACS: RUMOURS AND REALITIES 67 

^'evenings," when they roamed the streets or went 
to the cinemas with their "boys." 

Now every Waac has to be in by eight, can go 
nowhere without permission, Is carefully though 
unostentatiously shepherded, and Is provided with 
healthy recreation, such as Swedish exercises, 
Morris dancing, hockey, and the like. In short, 
she Is now looked after and guarded as young 
girls of the educated classes are normally. 

And these are the girls, good, honest, hard- 
working creatures, who have been maligned in 
whispers and giggles up and down the country. 
It Is perhaps needless to say that they are natu- 
rally very indignant over it, that the parents of 
many write to them agitatedly to demand If It's 
all true and to beg them to come back, and that 
sometimes, when they are home on leave. Instead 
of their uniforms bringing them the respect and 
honour they deserve and which every man over- 
seas accords to them, they are subjected to Insult 
from people who have nothing better to do than 
to betray to the world the pitiable condition of 
their own nasty minds. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BROWN GRAVES 

When first one has dealings with the Waacs 
and their officers, one imagines distractedly that 
one has fallen among Royalty. This is 
because the word *'Ma'am'' is always used by a 
Waac when speaking to another of superior rank, 
till you very nearly find yourself bobbing. Later 
this impression is strengthened by the memory for 
faces which every Waac officer displays in a man- 
ner one has always been taught to consider truly 
royal. It is only among themselves than any 
titles exist; to the outside world, even the Army 
officers, each Waac officer is mere *'Mrs." or 
"Miss," whichever she may chance to be. The 
"putting on of frills" has been avoided with ex- 
traordinary dexterity; there is just enough ritual 
to make the girls feel they belong to an organised 
body, without the enemy being given occasion to 
blaspheme by saying that women like playing at 
being men. In France, though not in England, 
the girls salute their officers, as this helps them to 
get at the "idea" of the thing — that feeling of 
being part of an ordered whole, which is so valu- 
able. 

58 



THE BROWN GRAVES 59 

In the matter of uniforms, someone at the War 
Office, or wherever these things are thought out, 
has really had a rather charming series of inspira- 
tions. At first the women wore the same badges 
as denote the ranks of soldiers, but a paternal — 
or should one not almost say maternal? — Govern* 
ment evidently thought that not feminine enough, 
and now the badges of varying rank are roses, 
fleur-de-lys and laurel leaves, a touch which would 
have delighted old Andrew Marvell. 

One of the chief activities of the Waacs Is cook- 
ing, and when, escorted by the D.D.M.S., whom 
I have before mentioned, I arrived at the little 
wooden office amidst the pines, it was to hear a 
one-sided conversation on the telephone between 
the Area Controller and various great ones of the 
earth who were frantically ringing up for cooks. 
Also a new Officers' Club for senior officers want- 
ing a rest from the firing line is just being opened 

near E , and It Is to be staffed by Waacs and 

the cook IS to be of the very best. Punch's Im- 
mortal advice as to the treatment of husbands is 
not forgotten by the Waac controllers when ques- 
tions of this kind arise. 

After talk of cooks came the seeing of cooks. In 
a big camp and Small Arms school near. Kitch- 
ens are kitchens and mess-rooms mess-rooms 
everywhere you go, and beyond a general Impres- 
sion of extreme cleanliness, an extraordinarily ap- 
pealing smell of stew, and the sight of great 



60 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

branches of mimosa set about the long mess tables, 
there Is nothing of particular Interest to describe. 
The point Is that all the preparing and the serv- 
ing of food In this great camp for officers and 
men Is done by women and that all the male crea- 
tures are unreservedly jubilant at the change. 
The CO. expressed his hope that after the war the 
W.A.A.C. would continue as a permanent part of 
the Army, while a sergeant gave It as his opinion 
that the women managed to introduce so much 
more variety Into the preparation of the food than 
the men had done. Also, he added that they 
wasted much less. 

In every kitchen there Is a forewoman cook — 
there are these forewomen In every department 
of the work of the women, and they correspond 
rather to the "noncoms" among the men. At 
present they are distinguished by a bronze laurel 
leaf and always have their own mess-room and 
sitting-room as distinct from the rest of the girls, 
but It Is rather an Influence than an authority which 
is vested In them, though the advisability of defi- 
nitely endowing them with more of the latter Is 
being considered. They ''answer," as the rest of 
the Waac machinery does, extremely well. 

An interesting pomt about army kitchens, as 
they are run nowadays. Is that after the amount 
of fats necessary to the cooking has been put 
aside, the rest Is poured Into great tins, graded 
according to Its quality, and sent home for muni- 



THE BROWN GRAVES 61 

tions. We are getting things down to the fine 
edge of no-waste at last, and the women are help- 
ing to do It. 

At another camp I found the CO. most anxious 
for the women to start a Mending Factory — It 
would be such a help to the men, who, unlike sail- 
ors, are not adept at the repairing of their clothes. 
Also a laundry, he Intimated, would be necessary 
really to round off the scheme satisfactorily. Both 
these are thoroughly sound suggestions that may 
yet, let us hope, come to something, though they 
would be In a sense breaking new ground, as the 
Idea of the Waacs Is that they actually replace 
men. Each cook releases one man, while among 
the clerks at present the ratio Is four women to 
three men. And there are already six thousand 
Waacs In France . . . Does not this give the ob- 
vious reason why slanders, started by enemy 
agents, have been busy trying to drive the 
Women^s Army out of France? 

Every Waac who goes to France is like the 
pawn who attains the top of the chessboard and 
is exchanged for a more valuable piece. She sends 
a fighting man to his job by taking on the jobs that 
are really a woman's after all. For is It not 
woman's earliest job to look after man? 

She looks after him to keep him well and strong, 
she looks after him when he is ill — and now, in 
France, she looks after the gallant dead, who are 
lying in the soil for which they fought. Between 



G2 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

the pines and the gleaming river with its sandy 
shoals are the rows of crosses, sparkling, the ash 
grey wood of them, in the effulgence of the spring 
light, making hundreds of points of brightness 
above the earth still brown and bare, that soon, 
under the gardeners' care, will blossom like the 
rose. Not a desert even now — for no place where 
fighters rest is a desert — ^but a place expectant, 
fliU of the promise of beauty to come, an outward 
beauty which is what it calls for as its right, be- 
cause it is holy ground. Not only in the merely 
technical sense as the consecrated earth of quiet 
English cemeteries, where lie all, both those who 
lived well and those who lived basely, but holy 
as a place can only be when it is held by those who 
all died perfectly . . . 

I Here and there, among the earth-brown graves, 
stooping above them, are the earth-brown figures 
of the gardeners. Every grave is freshly raked, 
moulded between w6oden frames to a flat, high 
surface where the flowers are to overflow, and 
above every raised dais of earth the bleached 
wood of the cross spreads its arms, throwing a 
shadow soft and blue like a dove's feather, a 
shadow that'curves over the mound and laps down 
its edge lightly as a benison. On each cross is the 
little white metal plate giving the name and regi- 
ment of the man who lies beneath and the lettei's 
R.I. P. Here and there is an ugly stiff wreath 
of artificial immortelles beneath a glass frame, the 



THE BROWN GRAVES 63 

pathetic offering of those who came from Eng- 
land to lay it there. 

Sometimes a wreath fresh and green shows that 
someone who loves the dead man has sent money 
with a request that flowers shall be bought and 
put upon his grave on the anniversary of his death. 
Sometimes, when they come over from England, 
these poor people break down and turn blindly, 
as people will for comfort, to the nearest sym- 
pathy, to the women gardeners who are showing 
them the grave they came to see. And a sudden 
note of that deep undercurrent which at times of 
stress always turns the members of either sex to 
their own sex for comfort sends the women mourn- 
ers to the arms of the women who are working 
beside them. Sentiment, if you will — ^but a senti- 
ment that is stirred up from the deep and which 
would scorn the apologies of the critical. 

And what of the girls who work daily on that 
sacred earth, who see before their eyes, bright in 
the sun, inexpressibly grey and dauntless in the 
rain, those serried rows of crosses, all so alike 
and each standing for a different individuality, a 
different heartbreak — Do you suppose that they 
will ever again forget the aspect of those silent 
witnesses to the splendour and the unselfishness 
and the utter release from pettiness of the men 
who lie there? This is what it is to make good 
citizens, and that is what the members of the 
Women's Army are doing daily. They are not 



64 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

only doing great things for the men — ^but they 
are making of themselves, come what conditions 
may after the war, efficient, big-minded citizens 
who will be able to meet with them. 



CHAPTER VIII 

VIGNETTES 

The interesting thing about the various places 
where Waacs are housed, which I saw, is that 
no two of them were alike in atmosphere. 
I had rather dreaded much seeing of camps, but, 
as a matter of fact, though I saw two, they were 
totally unlike each other, while the other three 
places that I saw each had an aspect, a charac- 
ter, unlike the others. One was a convalescent 
home for Waacs, set amidst pine-trees, a house of 
deep wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned 
chairs, and flowers, where one might well be con- 
tent to be just-not-well for a long time ; the others 
were houses where those Waacs lived who were 
not in camps. ' 

Four jaunty chalets, chalk-white in the sun, 
hung with painted galleries, face the rolling sand- 
dunes, behind them the sea, a darker blue than 
any of the shadows of land on such a high-keyed 
day. They are Httle pleasure-villas, these chalets, 
fancy erections for summer visitors, built in the 
days when this little Plage was a resort for Pari* 

65 



66 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

sians playing at rusticity. Delicious artificial use- 
less-looking creations, bearing apparently about 
as much relation to a normal house as a boudoir- 
cap does to a bowler. Yet they are charming as 
only little French pleasure-villas can be, and to the 
receptive mind it is their artificiality that makes 
such a delightful note of — well, not decadence, 
but dilettantism — in this rolling sandy place, 
where only the hand of Nature is to be seen all 
around, no town, no village even, impinging on 
the curving skylines, the very road up to their 
doors but a track in the sand. 

In these villas live incongruous Waacs, their 
khaki-clad forms swing up the wooden stairs to 
the galleries, and lean from the windows, always 
open their widest, night and day. Less incongru- 
ous the stout boots and khaki inside, as, though 
the chintzes are bright and gay, there is an aspect 
of stern utility, combined with an austerity that 
somehow suits the blank sandiness of the sur- 
roundings. In each little scrubbed room are two 
beds, each — for the Waacs live in true Army fash- 
ion — with its dark grey blankets folded up at the 
head of the bare mattress ; in the sick bay alone 
the beds are covered with bright blue counter- 
panes. In the recreation room and the Fore- 
women's Mess are easy chairs of wicker and 
flowers and pictures. It is all done as charm- 
ingly as it can be with a strict eye to suitability; 
it is community life, of course, but brought as 



VIGNETTES 67 

nearly as possible to that feeling of individuality 
which makes a home with a small "h" instead of 
with the dreaded capital. 

This other house was as great a contrast to the 
bare little chalets as it well could be. It also was 
at a Plage, it too had been built for pleasure, but 
for pleasure de luxe, not of simple bourgeois fami- 
lies. The wide hall with its polished floor, its 
great carved mantels, its dining-room with gleam- 
ing woods and glossy table and sparkling glass, 
its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls 
dance and play the piano — all was as different 
from the bleached scrubbed wood of the chalets as 
it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the 
whole was the same, the bedrooms as austere in 
essence even if they boasted carved marble-topped 
chests, and even here the Army had found things 
to improve, such as the making of paths at the 
back of the house of round tins sunk in the earth, 
and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious arrange- 
ments to save getting your feet wet on a muddy 
day as you go in and out on the endless errands 
of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in the 
gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned 
on the wide stone hearth, I heard the girls prac- 
tising for a musical play they were shortly to 
produce. 

2]> sp ^^ ^p ^p 



68 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

A camp Is, of course, a camp, but there Is a cer- 
tain satisfaction In seeing how well even a neces- 
sary evil can be done. Where all was excellent, 
the chief thing that really thrilled me was the 
bath-rooms. The Waacs' bath-rooms are the 
envy and despair of the Army, who rage vainly 
In small canvas tubs. The Engineers are by way 
of spoiling the Waacs whenever possible, and bath- 
rooms, electric bells, electric light and fancy paths 
of tin, spring up before them. There are in every 
Waac camp rows of bath-rooms containing each 
Its full-length bath, and besides that, each girl 
has her own private wash-place. In a cubicle for 
the purpose. For, as the Chief Controller said 
to me, "After all. It does not matter the girls 
having to sleep together In dormitories if each 
has absolute privacy for washing, that Is so much 
more Important." To which It Is quite possible 
to retort that there are those of us who would 
not mind bathing In front of the whole world If 
only we are allowed to sleep by ourselves. But 
that Is just a different point of view, and as a mat- 
ter of fact, for the class from which the greater 
part of the Waacs are drawn, privacy In ablutions 
ranks as a greater thing than privacy In slumber, 
so the psychological Instinct which planned the 
camps is justified. 

Besides the bath-rooms and the ablution cubi- 
cles, there Is In every camp one or more drying- 
rooms, which are always heated, and where the 



VIGNETTES 69 

wet clothes of the girls, who of course have to 
be out In all weathers, are hung to dry. Laundry, 
kitchens, recreation rooms, mess-rooms, long Nis- 
sen huts for sleeping, I went the round of them all, 
and, while genuinely admiring them, admired 
still more those who lived in them. 

Personally, I don't like a Nissen hut nearly as 
much as the ordinary straight-walled sort. I 
know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to 
move, but when it comes to trying to tack a pic- 
ture on those curved walls . . . And the girls 
depend so on their little bits of things, such as 
pictures and photographs from home. You will 
always see in every cubicle, above every bed in a 
long hut, the girl's own private gallery, the lares 
and penates which make of her, in her bed at 
least, an Individual. In a Nissen hut you have to 
turn your head upside down to get a view of the 
picture gallery at all, though It has its advan- 
tages to the girl herself as she lies in bed and can 
look at the faces of her parents, absolutely con- 
cave, curving over her nose. 

As I was leaving this camp I heard sounds of 
music and the stamping of feet, and going to the 
Y.W.C.A. hut the Unit Administrator and I 
looked in. There, to a vigorously pounded piano, 
an instructress from the Y.M.C.A. was teaching 
a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They 
beamed at us from hot glowing faces, these mighty 
daughters of the plough, and continued to foot it 



70 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

as merrily, if as heavily, as any Elizabethan vil- 
lagers dancing in their Sunday smocks around a 
Maypole. 

***** 

One more camp I saw, on a later day, and 
though it was a camp, yet it had that about it 
which distinguished it from all others. For It was 
built round about a hoary castle, grey with years 
and lichen, from whose walls they say Anne 
Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust 
and rufous lover on that honeymoon which was 
almost all of happiness she was to know. 

Now it is an Army School, and within its grey 
walls and towers the officers are billeted and In 
Its great kitchens the Waacs cook for them and 
do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting on 
the officers* mess and the sergeants' mess, serving 
at the canteen, doing all the cleaning, everything 
that there Is to be done for a whole army school 
of hungry men down on a five-weeks' course, to 
say nothing of all the work for themselves in their 
camp at the castle's gates, and there are sixty-six 
of them, not counting the three officers who are at 
every Waac camp — the Unit Administrator, and 
the Deputy and Assistant Administrators. It is 
hard work, and endless work, and though every 
Waac gets a few hours off every day, and though, 
as you have seen, everything is done for their 
healthy recreation that can be done, yet the life 
IS one of work and not of fun, and though the 



VIGNETTES 71 

girls flourish under It, we at home should not for- 
get that fact when we give them their due meed 
of appreciation. 

But, hard as the life is. It seemed to me that at 
that camp which has the happiness to be at this 
castle, its duress must be assuaged by the beauty 
of what is always before the eyes. Buried in 
woods it is, still bare when I saw them, but with 
the greenish yellow buds of daffodils already be- 
ginning to unfold in great clumps through the 
purple-brown alleys, and with primroses making 
drifts of honey-pallor and honey-sweetness beside 
the slopes of ground ivy, while from beyond the 
curving ramparts of the castle shows the steely- 
quiet glimmer of a lake. 

For war this castle was built, and war she now 
sees once again, for the arts of war are taught 
within her walls. And how Anne Boleyn's roving 
eyes would have brightened at the sight of so much 
youth, at the sound of so many spurs 1 Let us 
hope her sore spirit can still find pleasure In wan- 
dering again over the scenes where she once was 
happy, and if she has kept enough of innocent 
wantonness to love a straight man when she sees 
one, ghost though she be, and if her nose turn up 
ever so daintily at the clumsily-clad members of 
her own sex, whose toils she would so little under- 
stand . . . why, she is but a ghost, and the mod- 
ern mind must contrive to forgive her. 

«{C ^S 3|C Sf^ ^pt 



72 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

These slight vignettes have all been of vision; 
let me add one of a less pictorial nature. The 
Unit Administrators, as I have said, have to act 
not only as commanding officers, but very often 
as mother-confessors as well. Parents write to 
them about their daughters, would-be suitors write 
to them for permission to marry their charges, 
and amongst the letter-bag are often epistles that 
are not without their unconscious humour. One 
day a mother writes to point out that she and the 
rest of the family are changing houses, and so may 
Flossie please come home for a few days . . . 
another mentions that Gladys's letters of late 
have been despondent, and please could she be 
put to something else that will not depress her? 
Then Gladys is had up In front of the Unit Ad- 
ministrator, and perhaps turns out to be one of the 
born whiners found everywhere, perhaps to be 
merely suffering from a passing fit of what our 
ancestresses would have called the megrims. If 
her work is found to be really unfitted to her and 
It is possible to give her a change, then it is done, 
but as a rule that is seldom the case, as, rather 
differently from what we used to hear was the 
way in the Army, every Waac Controller finds 
out what the girl is best at and what she likes 
doing most, and then, as far as possible, arranges 
her work accordingly. 

Perhaps a letter comes from a Tommy In His 



VIGNETTES 73 

Majesty's forces, and begins something like this : — f 

''Dear Madam, 

*'I beg to ask your permission to marry 
Miss D. Robinson, at present under your com- 
mand. ..." 

The Unit Administrator writes back that 
she will endeavour to arrange leave for the mar- 
riage ; and perhaps all goes well, or perhaps some 
such lugubrious letter as this will follow : — 

"Dear Madam, 

^^Re Miss D. Robinson, at present under your 
command, take no notice of my former letter, as 
Miss D. Robinson has broken off the engage- 
ment ..." 

Human nature will be Inhuman, in camps and 
out of them, and because Miss D. Robinson Is do- 
ing a man's work is no reason why she should 
shed the privileges of her sex. 



CHAPTER IX 

EVENING 

Grey rain was falling In straight thin lines 
upon the landscape, suddenly changed from Its 
splendour of sun-bright sands and blue gleaming 
river to a blotted greyness. The rain danced 
over the trampled earth at the V.A.D. Motor 
Convoy Camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled 
water and making the great ambulances 
shine darkly. It was not a pleasant evening, be- 
ing very cold withal, and snow fell amid the rain, 
but the Commandant took me out in her car to 
give me as comprehensive a view of E ■ ' as 
could be seen In the gathering dusk. 

When I say E I don't mean the little 

French fishing village, near which we did npt go, 
but the whole vast town of huts set up by the 
B.E.F. For E Is become a town of hospi- 
tals. We swung round corners, down long inter- 
secting roads, about and about, and always there 
were hospitals, long rows of hospitals, each a lit- 
tle town in itself. I was reminded of nothing so 
much as the great temporary townships in the 
Canal Zone at Panama. There is just the same 

74 



EVENING 75 

look of permanence combined with the feeling 
of it all being but temporary, while materially 
there is an air about board and tin buildings which 
is the same the world over. I almost expected to 
see a negro slouch along with his tools slung on 
his back, or to catch sight of the dark film of a 
mosquito-proof screen over doors and windows. 

And the Motor Convoy do all of the ambulance 
work of the whole big district, which spreads con- 
siderably beyond even this great hospital town. 
There are about one hundred and thirty members 
in the camp and about eighty of the big Buick 
ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had 

seen, there are at E always day and night 

shifts, a girl being on night duty for one fort- 
night and on day duty for the next, except in times 
of stress, when everyone works day and night too. 

We came in from our drive in the dark and I 
was shown to the room I was to have for as much 
of the night as there would be, considering I was 
going out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged 
to a V.A.D. at the moment home on leave, but 
she had left a nice selection of bed-books behind 
her, for which I was grateful, and there was a 
little electric reading lamp perched on the shelf 
above the bed. It was a tiny place, but it was 
all to myself. 

At supper in the mess-room, with Mr. Leps, the 
Great Dane, lying by the stove and the cat curled 
between his outflung paws, we were waited on by 



76 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

a very pretty V.A.D. with dark eyes and a deeply 
moulded face compact of soft curves and pallor. 
Afterwards, the Commandant, a few of the girls, 
and I went into her room, which was a trifle larger 
than the ordinary run, and could be called a sit- 
ting-room at one end, for coffee and cigarettes. 
There was a concert on, and I was asked whether 
I would like to go to it, and, at the risk of seeming 
ungracious, I said if they didn't mind I would 
rather not. They said that they would rather not, 
too. I had seen the camp before dinner, had 
marvelled again how people ever got used to liv- 
ing in match-boxes and having to cross a strip 
of out-of-doors world to meals, and I was only 
wanting to sit still, and — if the Fates were kind — • 
listen. 

For all the time, as during the preceding days, 
I had felt the depression growing over me, the 
terror of this communal life which took all you 
had and left you — what? What corner of the 
soul is any refuge when solitude cannot be yours 
in which to expand it? What vagrant impulse can 
be cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge 
it? 

These girls, these strong, clear-eyed creatures 
whom I had seen, day after day, who had at first 
impressed me only with their youth, their school- 
girl gaiety, their — horribile dictu, — their *'bright- 
ness" — was it possible that this life should really 
content them? I am not talking now, remember, 



EVENING 77 

of Waacs, girls mostly of the working class, or of 
those used to the sedentary occupation of clerk- 
ships, to whom this life is the biggest freedom, the 
greatest adventure, they have known. I am talk- 
ing about girls of a class who, in the nature of 
things, lived their own lives, before the war, did 
the usual social round, went hither and thither 
with no man to say them nay — except a father, 
who doesn't count. Young femmes du monde, 
there is no adequate English for it, sophisticated 
human beings. 

For women, even the apparently merely out-of- 
door hunting games-playing women, have arrived 
at a high state of sophistication; and this life 
they now lead is a community life reduced to its 
essentials. And a community life, though the 
building up of it marked the first stages of civilisa- 
tion, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, 
anathema. Individuals had to combine to make 
the world, but now that it Is made, all the Instincts 
of the most highly developed in it are towards 
complete liberty as regards the amount of social 
Intercourse in which he or she wishes to Indulge. 
We have fought through thousands of years for 
a state of society so civilised that it is safe to with- 
draw from It and be alone without one's enemy 
tracking one down and hitting one over the head 
with an axe. 

This right, fought for through the ascending 
ages, these girls have deliberately forgone, as 



78 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

every man in the Army has to forgo it also. Were 
they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like 
it, unthinkingly, without analysis? 

I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys 
and camps, and I had wondered again as I saw 
over this convoy — saw the usual tiny cubicles, 
with gay chintz curtains and photographs from 
home, and the shelf of books, saw the great bare 
mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with cush- 
ions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the 
admirable bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths 
and an unlimited supply of hot water, saw the 
two parks where the great ambulances were 
ranged, shadowy and huge in the growing gloom 
and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere smil- 
ing faces, uplifted voices, quick steps — ^yet I won- 
dered. 

Was it possible this malaise of community life 
never weighed on their souls ? And, if possible — 
was it good that it should be so? 

I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of 
my thought, of the depression which had been 
eating at me — ^not, as I tried to explain, that I 
didn't admire them all. Heaven knew, rather that 
I must be, personally, such a weak-kneed, back- 
boneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any cause 
on earth, have stood it. And I wanted — how I 
wanted — to know how it was they did ... 
whether they really and actually could like it 
. . . ? "Of course, I know," I ended apolo- 



EVENING 79 

getically, "some people like a community life " 

"They must be in love with it to like com- 
munity life carried to this extent, then/' said one 
swiftly, and a small, fair creature, with a ribbon 
bound round her hair, agreed with her. She in- 
terested me, that fair girl, because she was one 
of those people who feel round for the right word 
until they have found it, however long it takes; 
impervious to cries of "Go on, get it off your 
chest," she still sat quietly and wrestled until the 
word came which exactly expressed the fine edge 
of her meaning. She knew so well what she 
wanted to say that she didn't want to say it any 
differently. 

They all talked, each throwing in a sentence to 
the discussion now and again, but not one of them 
grumbled. Yet they all showed plainly that it 
was not a blind enjoyment — or, indeed, much en- 
joyment at all — ^that they found in the life. They 
were reasoning, critical, analytic, and extraordi- 
narily dispassionate. 

I can't put that conversation down for two rea- 
sons, the first being that one doesn't print the talk 
of one's hostesses, and the second that it would 
be too dif&cult to catch all those little half-uttered 
sentences, those little alleys of argument that led 
to understanding, but led elliptically, as is the way 
of either sex when it is unencumbered by the ne- 
cessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension 
of the other. But out of that hour emerged, shin-j 



so THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

ing, several things which we in England ought to 
realise better, and which lifted for me that cloud 
of depression which had lowered over me all the 
days in France. 

These are not bouncing school-girls, "good fel- 
lows'' having the time of their lives, as vaguely 
those in England consider them, they are, thank 
goodness, finely-evolved human beings who no 
more enjoy "brightness" than you or I would. 
And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was 
so "bright" which had oppressed me more than 
anything else. The joy of finding that it wasn't 
so, that what I had feared I should be forced to 
take as the unreflecting school-girl humour of 
overgrown school-girls was only a protective as- 
pect, that behind it the eyes of not only sane but 
subtle young women looked out with amusement 
and patience upon a world determined to see in 
them, first and last, "brightness" I 

Perhaps five per cent. — such was the estimate 
flung out into the talk — of the girls really do en- 
joy It, the ghastly, prolonged, cold-blooded picnic 
of It, perhaps five per cent, really are having the 
"time of their lives," but the rest of them have 
moments when It hardly seems possible to stick 
It. Yet they stick it, and stick It In good comrade- 
ship, which is the greatest test of the lot. Their 
salvation lies in the separate rooms^ — small, cold, 
but a retreat from the octopus of community 
life. ... 




WAACS IST THE BAKERT 




WAAC COOKS PREPARING VEGETABLES 




WAAC ENCAMPMENT PROTECTED BY SANDBAGS 



EVENING 81 

That concert which I had felt so apologetic not 
to attend — ^what a relief It had been to them that I 
didn't want to, didn't want to get *'local colour" 
and write of them as being so jolly, so gay! For 
this again Is typical — ^^there are perhaps five girls 
out of every hundred who enjoy being amused, to 
whom It Is all part of the life which they actually 
love, but from the greater part goes up the cry, 
"Work us as hard as you like, but for Heaven's 
sake don't try and amuse us !" 

For, of course, It takes differing temperaments 
differently. To some community life Is little short 
of a nightmare, but to all there come moments 
when it Is exceedingly maddening. In those mo- 
ments your own room or a big hot bath are won- 
derful ways of salvation. 

As we talked, from A. came the theory that she 
was only afraid It would prevent her ever loving 
motors again; and she had always adored motors 
as the chief pleasure of life, before they became 
the chief business. B. could not agree to that. 
C, who did agree, pointed out that It was on the 
same principle as never wanting to go back to a 
place, no matter how beautiful it was, if you had 
been very unhappy there. Even after your un- 
happiness was dead and buried it would always 
spoil that place for you. . . . B. said "Yes" to 
that, but argued that it would not spoil the beauty 
of other places for you, which would be the equlv- 




82 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

alent of this life spoiling all motors for A., after 
the war. 

The flaws in the analogy were not pursued, for 
D. advanced an interesting theory that the hardest 
part of it was that you were so afraid of what 
you might be missing all the time somewhere else. 
She argued that the difficulty with her had always 
been to make up her mind to any one course of 
action, because it shut off all the others, and, like 
so many of us, she wanted everything. . . , 

A. said that shilly-shalliers never got anywhere, 
but I maintained with D. that it wasn't shilly- 
shallying, which is another sort of thing alto- 
gether, it was the passionate desire to get the most 
out of life, to discover what was most worth 
while. "I want to spend ten years in the heart of 
China more than to do any one thing," I pointed 
out, "but I sha'n't do it because when I came out 
I shouldn't be young any more. Therefore the 
ten years in China will have to go to a man, be- 
cause it doesn't matter so much to a man." This 
life in the B.E.F. was D.'s ten years in China, 
not because — heaven forbid — it is going to last 
ten actual years, or even that, as far as I could 
see, it was ageing her at all, but simply because 
while she was doing it she couldn't be doing any- 
thing else. She had had to burn her boats. 

Now that, to a certain temperament, means a 
great deal, and it is one of the things, if not the 
cbipf thing, that marks service in France off from 



EVENING 83 

equally hard work at home, and makes it, for rea- 
sons outside the work, so much harder. 

All natures are not the same as D.'s, of course. 
To one girl a certain thing is the hardship, to an- 
other a different thing. But the point is that the 
hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to 
me it was the most exquisite discovery I could 
have made in the whole of France. For the finer 
the instrument, the more fine it Is of it to per- 
form the work, and the more finely will that work, 
in the long run, be done. 



CHAPTER X 

NIGHT 

I 

Not being among the lucky creatures who can 
fall happily to sleep when they know they are to 
be called at one o'clock, I lay In my tiny bed and 
revelled in that wonderful story of *'The Bridge 
Builders'' out of 'The Day's Work," till the 
sound of the storm without became the voice of 
Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and 
lay and listened to the truly fiendish train whistles 
which no reading could have transmuted, and won- 
dered why it is that French engine drivers appar- 
ently pay no attention to signals, but just go on 
whistling till they are answered, like someone 
who goes on ringing a bell till at length the door 
is opened. The rain was turning to snow, so there 
was less of that steady tinkling from without with 
which running water fills the world. I lay and 
listened; and the whistles and the bellying of the 
chintz curtain and the occasional swish of a heavy 
gust against the side of the hut were at last be- 
ginning to blend in one blur In my mind when a 
girl came softly Into my room and whispered that 
it was time to dress. 

84 



NIGHT 85 

That utter quietness of the girls was a thing that 
had impressed me after staying in hotels full of 
the British Army, which goes to bed at midnight, 
bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts 
from room to room, and begins the whole proc- 
ess, reversed, at about six o'clock the next morn- 
ing. Here the girls wore soundless slippers, so 
that those who had to be about should not disturb 
those who slept, and doors were opened and shut 
with a cotton-wool care which appealed to me, or 
would have, if I hadn't had to get up. 

When I was dressed I found my way down end- 
less blowy corridors, for the doors at the ends 
are always kept open, to the room of the girl who 
had called me. She looked at my fur coat and 
said it would get spoilt. I replied with great truth 
that It was past spoiling, but she took it off me, 
whipped my cap from my head, and the girls 
proceeded to dress me. They pulled a leather 
cap with ear-pieces down on my head and stuffed 
me Into woolly jackets and wound my neck up In 
a comforter and finished up with a huge leather 
coat and a pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, 
so that when all was done I couldn't bend and 
had to be hoisted quite stiff up to the front of the 
ambulance. 

But first we all went into the kitchen, where 
part of the domestic staff sits up all night to pre- 
pare food for the night drivers. There we drank 
the loveliest cocoa I ever met, the sort the spoon 



S6 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

would stand up in, piping hot, out of huge bowls. 
Then my driver and the section leader for the 
night led me across the soaking park to where, 
In almost total darkness, girls were busy with 
their ambulances. I was hoisted up beside my 
driver and endeavoured clumsily with my bear's 
paws to fasten the canvas flap back across the side 
as I was bidden. I may say that I felt extraordi- 
narily clumsy amongst these girls, most of whom 
could have put me in their pockets. They knew 
so exactly what to do, their movements were all 
so perfectly adjusted to their needs, they knew 
where everything was, while I fumbled for steps 
and hoped for the best. . . . They made me feel, 
in the beautiful way they shepherded me, that I 
was a silly useless female and that they were grave 
chivalrous young men ; they watched over me with 
just that matter-of-fact care. 

To me it was all wonderful, that experience. 
To the girls, who do It every night, every alter- 
nate fortnight, year In, year out, the thrill of It 
has naturally gone long since ; the wonder Is that 
to them all remains the pity of It. We swung out 
of the park Into the road. There was no moon, 
the stars were mostly hidden by the heavy clouds, 
the sleet blew In gusts against the wind screen. 
We went at a good pace, bound for a Canadian 

hospital, and then for a station beyond E , 

where the train was waiting, for this was what 
is called an "evacuation" that I was going to see. 



NIGHT 87 

No train of wounded was due in that night, and 
the Convoy's business was to take men who were 
being sent elsewhere from the hospitals to the 
train. 

We stopped in front of a shadow hospital, set 
in a town of shadow-huts, and a door opened to 
show an oblong of orange light, and send a paler 
shaft widening out into the night towards the sleek 
side of our ambulance. 

We heard the men being placed in the ambu- 
lance, the word was given, and again we set off 
through the night, this time so slowly, so carefully, 
for we carried that which must not be jarred one 
hair's breadth more than could be helped. We 
crept along the roads, past the pines that showed 
as patches of denser blackness against the sky, 
past the sand-dunes that glimmered ghostly, past 
the blots of shadow made by every shrub and tree- 
trunk, and behind and before us crawled other 
ambulances, laden even as we. 

The station was wrapped in darkness, save for 
a hanging light here and there, and an occasional 
uncurtained window in the waiting train. We 
drew up under a light, where a sergeant was wait- 
ing. • ^ 

"Four from No. 7 Canadian," said my driver 
crisply. The sergeant repeated, looked at a list 
he carried and marked our cases off it duly, then 
told us the number of the compartment where we 



88 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

should stop. The ambulance slid on, very slowly, 
beside the train and slowly came to rest. 

I could see into the white-painted interior of 
the train, could see the shelves running along its 
sides, and on the shelves, making oblong shapes 
of darkness against all the white, men laid 
straightly ... in front of us the Red Cross or- 
derlies were sliding men down on stretchers from 
the shelves of an ambulance, slipping them out, 
carrying them up into the train and packing them 
on the shelves like fragile and precious parcels. 

And suddenly it seemed to me there was some- 
thing profoundly touching about the sight of a 
man lying flat and helpless, shoved here and there, 
in spite of all the care and kindness with which it 
was accomplished. It is a thing wrong in essence, 
it seems an outrage on Nature^ — I got an odd feel- 
ing that there was something wrong and unnatural 
about the mere posture of lying-down that I never 
thought of before. The world seemed suddenly 
to have become deformed, as a monster is de- 
formed who Is born distorted. It shouldn't be 
possible to slide men on to shelves like this. . . . 

The girl at the wheel pushed back the little 
shutter set in the front of the ambulance and we 
looked into the dimly-lit interior. I could see the 
crowns of four heads, the jut of brow beyond 
them, the upward peak of the feet under the grey 
blankets, pale hands, one pair thin as a child's, 
that lay limply along the edge of the stretchers. ' 



NIGHT 89 

The orderlies came to the open door, one man 
mounted within, and the top stretcher from one 
side was slipped along its grooves and dis- 
appeared, tilted into the night. The boy on the 
top stretcher the other side turned his head lan- 
guidly and watched — I could see a pale cheek, 
foreshortened from where I sat, a sweep of long 
dark eyelashes, the curve of the drooping upper 
lip. His turn came, and, passive, he too was slid 
out, then the two men below were carried away 
and up into the train. The ambulance was empty. 

We turned in a circle over* the muddy yard and 
started off again, stopping again by the sergeant 
to get our orders. 

* 'Number 4,'* said, the sergeant, and we swung, 
once more at a good pace, along the heavy roads, 
took fresh turnings about and about in the city 
of hospital huts, and drew up at Number 4. 

Again we were loaded, and again we crept back' 
along the roads where we had a few minutes be- 
fore gone so swiftly, meeting empty cars, keeping 
in line behind those laden like ourselves. Again 
we slowed down by the waiting sergeant to say, 
*'Two stretchers and two sitters from Four." 
He echoed us, and we crept on to the appointed 
carriage and stopped. So it went on through 
a couple of hours, ambulance after ambulance 
swiftly leaving the station, slowly coming back, 
all drawing up gently by the train, each, opened, 
making a faint square of light in the velvet dark- 



90 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

ness. -And then, at last, when It was all over, the 
return, swift again, towards the camp. 

We bumped along the road, the dim pines fall- 
ing away Into the shadows behind, a very mild 
funnel of light showing us a scrap of the way 
before us and of hedge on either side, the twigs 
of it perpetually springing out palely to die away 
once more. The wind was behind us and the 
screen clear; far ahead of us on the road was an 
empty ambulance with Its curtains drawn back, 
bare but for Its empty stretchers and dark blank- 
ets, which made. In the pale glow of the white- 
painted Interior, a sinister Face — two hollow eyes 
and a wide mouth — ^that fled through the night, 
always keeping the same distance ahead, grimac- 
ing at me, like an image of the Death's Head of 
War. ... I was glad when It swung round a 
turning and was lost to us. 

We drove Into the unrelieved darkness of the 
convoy park and drew up with precision In our 
place, I wrestled again with the flap, and we got 
out Into the wet sleet, half-snow, half-rain. My 
driver covered up the bonnet with tarpaulin, 
turned off the lights, and we went across to the 
kitchen. It was half-past three, and we were the 
first to come back; we asked for bowls of soup 
and stood sipping them and munching sandwiches 
that lay ready cut In piles upon the table. 

Then, one ofter another, the drivers entered 
. . . pulling off their great gloves as they came, 



NIGHT 91 

stamping the snow from their boots. They stood 
about, drinking from their steaming bowls, bright- 
eyed, apparently untired, throwing little quick 
scraps of talk to each other — about the slowness 
of "St. John's" on this particular night, who hadn't 
their cases ready and kept one or two ambulances 
"simply ages"; or the engine trouble developed 
by one car which still kept it out somewhere on 
the Toad. And I stood and listened and watched 
them, and I received an impression of extraordi- 
nary beauty. 

These girls, with their leather caps coming 
down to their brows and over their ears, looked 
like splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces 
coming out from between the leather flaps. They 
were not pretty, they were touched with something 
finer, some quality of radiance only increased by 
their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with 
her clear face, her round, close head, her stamp- 
ing feet and strong, cold hands, seemed so in- 
tensely alive within the dark globe of the night, 
that her life was heightened to a point not earthly, 
as though she were a visitant from the snows or 
fields I had not seen, fields Olympian. , . . And 
as each came swinging in — *'vera incessu patuit 
dea, , . ." 

I could have wished them there for ever, like 
some sculptured frieze, so lovely was the Tightness 
and the inspiration of it. 

But I went to my bed, and one of the goddesses 



92 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

insisted on refilling my hot-water bag, though I 
assured her it would be quite well as it was, and I 
was unwound from my swaddling clothes and left 
to dream. 



CHAPTER XI 

"and the bright eyes of danger" 

Since the beginning of things women have been 
mixed up in war, and it is only as the world has 
become more civilised (if in view of the present 
one can make that assertion) that their place in 
it has been questioned. The whole question of 
the civilian population has taken on a different 
aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to 
the extraordinary and unprecedented penalties at- 
tached to the civilian status by Germany, but the 
sub-division labelled "Women" has perhaps under- 
gone more revision than any. It has undergone 
so much revision, in fact, that women have, in 
large masses, ceased to be civilians and are ranked 
as the Army. 

If it be frankly conceded that it is as natural for 
women to want to get to the war as men, one 
clears the way for profitable discussion without 
wasting time while the outworn epithets of "un- 
womanly" and "sensation-hunters" are flung 
through the air to the great obscuring thereof. 
The delight In danger for its own sake is common 
to all human beings, to the young as an intoxi- 

93 



94 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

cant, to the old as a drug. It is not the least 
of the tragedies of woman that this is a delight 
in which she is so seldom able to indulge. 

When the war broke, everyone wanted to go and 
see what it was like, and it is merely useless to 
observe that this was treating it as a huge picnic. 
Before the tightening-up process began, in the 
wonderful days when the war was still fluid, it 
was possible to get out to the front — ^the real 
front — on all sorts of excuses. The tightening-up 
was necessary, and all too slow, but let us not, 
because of that, fall into the error of calling the 
instinct which urged non-combatants "mere" curi- 
osity, as though that were not the greatest of the 
gifts of the gods, without which nothing Is done. 

Among these non-combatants who wanted to 
see the war were many women, and if, mixed with 
their patriotism and desire to help, went a streak 
of that love of danger which is no disgrace to a 
man — why, I maintain that it is no disgrace to a 
woman either, but as natural an instinct as that 
which drives one to a wayside orchard if one is 
hungry. 

There Is nothing sooner slaked, for the time 
being, than this inherent love of danger. Men 
who wanted the fun of it at the beginning of the 
war are heartily sick of It now, though they 
wouldn't be out of it for worlds. But most of the 
women haven't been allowed enough danger to get 
sick of it, and so, in patches of young women you 



"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER" 95 

meet working in France, the old craving still lifts 
its head. I came across a delightful streak of it 
at T ', the oldest big convoy in France. 

The garage, over which the girls live, for their 
camp is still a-building, is set In the eye of the 
cold winter winds on the top of a hill overlookin-g 
the sea. It was snowing heavily as I drove up, 
great fat flakes of snow that wove and Interwove 
in the air In the way that only snowflakes can, so 
that sometimes they look as though they were 
falling upwards. The long line of the wooden 
garage showed dark in the background, in the 
space before it the ambulances stood about, but 
the girls were fox-trotting In couples all about 
them, their big rubber boots shuffling up little 
clouds of snow; on the head of one girl was 
swathed a greenish-blue handkerchief, which 
made a lovely note of colour against the swirling 
whiteness. 

I was taken in through the garage, where two 
drivers were painting their cars — for all painting 
is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected 
effects, as on one car which I saw, where *'Eve" 
from the Tatler and her little dog were depicted 
in front of the body — and up a flight of wooden 
stairs with an out-of-doors landing on top, to 
the cubicles, which opened off on either side of 
the open-ended passage for the whole length of 
the building. Here, in one of the little bedrooms 
for two, we had a meal of cocoa and cake, known 



96 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

as the "elevener," for the obvious reason that it 
is consumed at eleven every morning. It was all 
quite different from my evening at the convoy at 
E , but equally stimulating. 

The great plaint of the girls was that they 
weren't allowed nearer the fighting line, and I 
heard a story of how, in the early days, two cars 
had managed to get right through to Poperinghe, 
when that town was the centre of the Boche's at- 
tentions, by the simple expedient of the girl-driv- 
ers turning up their coat collars, pulling their 
peaked caps well down over their eyes, and just 
going ahead. They had a lovely time in Poper- 
inghe and lunched under shell-fire, and when the 
military, including the Staff, were sitting in cellars, 
the "Chaufferettes'* sallied forth and bought pic- 
ture post-cards. 

*'It's a shame they won't let us go up to the 
line now ^^ 

*'Yes, indeed," put in another very seriously, as 
though she were adding the last uncontrovertible 
proof to the perfidy of the authorities — ^'They 
let the sisters get shelled, so why shouldn't they 
let us?" 

Isn't that a delightful spirit, and, I beg leave to 
insist, a perfectly natural and proper one? Any 
decent human being would like to be shelled — 
who hasn't been shelled too much. It is like be- 
ing in love — a thing that ought to happen at least 
once to everybody. 



"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER" 97 

One of my hostesses was a violinist and plays 
at all the concerts for the wounded which take 
place thereabouts. I asked her whether she didn't 
find the work ruination to her fingers for the vio- 
lin, but all she said carelessly was that .they had 
been ruined for three years now, but it didn't 
matter, as anyway she couldn't have practised 
even if she had the time, since there were always 
some girls trying to sleep. 

And what do the local French people thinlc of 
these young girls in their midst, who work like 
men and are out in all weathers and drive the 
soldiers wounded in the great common cause? 
They are quite charming to them, and indeed, 
when they first came, the French met them at 
every station with bouquets of flowers, so that the 
girls, pleased and embarrassed, English fashion, 
had a triumphal progress. But there are some 
of the French neighbours who think the life must 
be very hard on the poor things, and when, a little 
while ago, the Convoy organised a paper chase, 
the popular belief was that the hares were escap- 
ing from the rigours of life. . . . When the pant- 
ing hares asked wayfaring traps for a lift, it was 
refused them, as, though the kindly drivers had 
every sympathy with the projected escape, they 
were not going to assist them to defy authority I 

The hardships which this Convoy had under- 
gone I did not hear about from them, but from 
their Commandant. She told me of three weeks 



98 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

at the beginning of things, when there were no 
fires, no hot water, except a little always simmer- 
ing for pouring into the radiators of the cars 
when there came a night call — for the snow was 
frozen on the ground all those three weeks and 
the water In the jugs was Ice. The girls didn't 
talk about that because they were not interested 
In It, but neither would they talk about one other 
thing, though for a very different reason — and 
that was of the time when, after the great Ger- 
man gas attacks at Nieuport, they had to drive 
the gassed men who came on the hospital trains. 
. . . You can't get them now to describe what 
that was like, nor would you have tried, warned 
by the sudden change of voice In which they even 
mentioned it. 

There was one point 'n which this Convoy 
seemed to me to touch the extreme of abnegation 
attained by the G.S.V.A.D.'s. I had seen much 
earlier In my visit a G.S.V.A.D. Convoy, but have 
not mentioned It because I saw It before I had 
really grasped essentials, and It appeared to me 
then just a plain Convoy, and as the bare facts 
of It were not as spectacular as those relating to 
the Fannies, I chose the latter to write about. 

The G.S.V.A.D.'s, as I have said, rank as pri- 
vates, and among them are workers of every kind 
— scrubbers, cooks, dispensers, clerks, motor driv- 
ers. This G.S.V.A.D. convoy which I had seen 
was made up of girls who had exchanged from 



"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OP DANGER" 99 

V.A.D. convoys, mostly from this very one at 

T where I now was ; and so they happened 

to be all friends and all girls of gentle birth. But 
when I saw their quarters — In a couple of tall 
French houses that had been converted to the 
purpose — I was very upset by the terrible fact that 
the girls had to share bedrooms. In all the camps 
I had seen since, both of Fannies and V.A.D.'s, 
each girl had her own tiny room which she cher- 
ished as her own soul — which, indeed, is what It 
amounts to. And the Waac officers, of course, 
have their own private rooms, though the girls 

sleep In dormitories. This convoy at T was 

the only voluntary one I had come across where 
the Inestimable privilege of solitude was missing, 
though that will be put right when the new camp 
is built. 

And here I may mention that, deeply as I ad- 
mire all the girls who are working so splendidly 
in France, I think perhaps my meed of admiration 
brims highest for those members of the G.S.V.A. 
D.*s who are gently born, for this very reason 
of the sleeping accommodation. Let us be frank, 
and admit that for the generality of working girls, 
such as the Waacs and a large proportion of the 
G.S.V.A.D.'s, it is not nearly so great a hardship 
to sleep in dormitories as It is for girls who 
have, as a matter of course, always been accus- 
tomed to privacy. It is not so bad in the case 
of members of a G.S. convoy such as that I have 



100 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

mentioned, where the girls are all friends, but 
what of those ladles who live in the big camps 
and sleep in long huts with other girls of every 
class, all, doubtless, decent good girls, but, in the 
nature of things, often girls with whom any ground 
of meeting must be limited to the barest common- 
alties of life? Also sometimes those in author- 
ity — those who are and always were professionals, 
not amateurs — have been known to use the power 
given to them, by the inferior rating of these girls, 
to make them rather miserable. 

Personally, I have long had a theory, which 
will doubtless bring down on me howls of rage 
from those who will say I am decrying the most 
noble of professions, that women are not meant 
to be nurses. It brings out all that is worst in 
them. The love of routine for its own sake, that 
deadly snare to which women and Government 
officials succumb so much more easily than do men^ 
is fostered in them. And so is the love of au- 
thority for their own sakes, which is almost worse. 
It has taken nothing less than this way to show 
what splendid creatures nurses are under their 
starched aprons. In times of peace only amateur 
women should be nurses; for it may be observed 
that the V.A.D. nurses, though they have had 
long enough to do it in, have not developed the 
subtle disease of nursitis. Evidently nursing is 
a thing, like love-making, which should never be- 
come a profession. 



"AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER", 101 

I was glad to have seen all the different con- 
voys I had, because no two had been to me alike, 
and to each I am indebted for a differing expres- 
sion of the same vision, which is the vision splen- 
did of a duty undertaken gladly and sustained 
with courage. From my first convoys — ^the Fan- 
nies and the G.S.V.A.D.'s — I got the wonderful 

facts of it, at the V.A.D. Convoy at E I 

caught that side of it which I was most glad of 
all to encounter, and at the V.A.D. Convoy at 

T I found that delightful spirit of sheer joy 

in danger which is too precious to be allowed to 
die out of the world just because there happens 
to be, at present, such a great deal too much dan- 
ger let loose upon it. 



CHAPTER XII 

REST 

The snow danced In a line white mist over the 
ploughed fields, and drove perpetually against the 
northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks that 
lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon 
the smooth flanks of the planes, but sinking into 
the rough-barked limes till they looked dappled 
with their brown ridges and the white veining, 
and oddly as though covered with the pelt of some 
strange animal. High In the web of bare branches, 
the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests 
for some race of fairy birds. 

Gracious country this, for all the desolate white- 
ness; It lay in great rolling slopes with drifts 
of purplish elms in the folds, and on the levels 
winding steel-dark streams along whose banks 
the upward-springing willows burned an ardent 
rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded 
along and the wind screen first starred In one 
place, then In another, then fell out altogether, 
one got a better and better view of it all. 

What a wonderful people the French are for 
agriculture. . . . Hardly a man did I see all the 

102 



REST 103 

days I motored about and about, but I saw mile 
after mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad 
women or boys guiding the slow ploughs, the 
rough-coated horses pulling patiently — white 
horses that looked pale against the bare earth, 
but a dark yellow when the snow came to show up 
the tarnishing that the service of man brings 
upon beasts. Several times I saw English sol- 
diers ploughing, and rejoiced. 

We came into the town that was our bourn 
in the grey of the evening, passed the grey glim- 
mer of the river between its grey stone quays, 
passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, 
in the rapidly deepening dusk, turned in through 
great wrought iron gates into a grey courtyard. 

It may have been gathered that, much as I ad- 
mire both their practical perfection and their spir- 
itual significance, I am no lover of camps, which 
seem to me among all things man-created upon 
God's earth about the most depressing. I had 
lived and moved and had my being in camps it 
seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my 
soul were frayed with camps. From the moment 
of walking into the old house at R a wonder- 
ful sense of rest that brooded over the place en- 
veloped me. The thing had an atmosphere, im- 
possible to exaggerate, though very difficult to 
convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that 
house was to me. 

It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, 



104 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

and there are In France at present some half- 
dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War 
Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of 
St. John, and staffed by V.A.D.'s. At all of them 
the relations of badly wounded are lodged and 
fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also 
convey them to and from the hospital. This 
much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been 
prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure 
that emanated from this house. 

The house was originally a butter market, and 
the entrance room, set about with little tables 
where the relations have their meals, has one side 
entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is 
for the staff, is glass-roofed, while that opening 
on the right hand of the dining-place, the lounge 
for the relations, has long windows all down the 
side; so it will be seen that light and air are 
abundant on the ground floor of the Hostel in 
spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard. 

From the relations' lounge, with Its slim ver- 
milion pillars ringed about with seats like those 
round tree-trunks, there goes up a curving stair- 
case of red tiles, with a carved baluster of oak 
greyish with age, a griffon sitting upright upon 
the newel. Up this staircase I was taken to my 
room, and there the completion of peace came 
upon me. 

One could see at a glance It would be quiet, 
beautifully quiet Its window gave on to the 



REST 105 

sloping grey flanks of pointed roofs and showed 
a filigree spire pricking the pale bubble of the 
wintry sky, its walls were panelled from floor to 
ceiling, its hangings were of white and vermilion, 
its floor dark and polished, and on the wide stone 
hearth burned a wood fire. And, to crown all, 
after tiny huts, it was so big a room that the cor- 
ners were filled with gracious shadow; and the 
firelight flickered up and down on the panelling 
and glimmered in the polished floor and set the 
shadows quivering. I lay back in a vermilion- 
painted chair and felt steeped in the bath of rest- 
fulness that the place was. 

The whole house was very perfectly "got-up," 
the maximum of effect having been attained with 
the minimum of expense, though not of labour; 
it all having been achieved under the direction of 
a former superintendent with a genius for decora- 
tion, who is now V.A.D. Area Commandant and 
still lives at the Hostel. The evening I arrived 
there, she and the staff were busy stenciling a buff 
bedspread with blue galleons in full sail, varied 
by gulls. Everything is exceedingly simple, there 
is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt. The 
walls are all panelled, and painted either ivory 
or dark brown; the furniture is of wicker and 
plain wood, painted in gay colours — rich blues 
and vermilion ; the tablecloths are of red or blue 
checks. In the spacious bedrooms are simple col- 
our schemes — in one there are thick, straight cur- 



106 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

tains of flaming orange, in another of a deep blue, 
In another of red and white checked material. 
The floors are of polished wood or red tiles 
strewn with rugs; vivid-coloured cushions lie in 
the easy chairs; and set about in earthen jars are 
great branches of mimosa and lilac from the 
South, boughs of pussy-willow, the tender velvety 
grey ovals blossoming into fragile yellow dust; 
all along the sills are indoor window-boxes filled 
with hyacinths of pink and white and a cold faint 
blue. 

On the walls the only decoration is that of post- 
ers, and these create an extraordinary effect as of 
a series of windows, opening upon different climes 
and strange worlds, windows set in ivory walls. 
Here is an old Norman castle, grey against a sky 
of luminous yellow, there a stream In Brittany 
which you can almost hear brawling past the 
plane-trees with their freckled trunks, while be- 
fond It, through another window, you see a pergola 
of roses whose deep red has turned wine-coloured 
under the moonlight, and beyond that again, the 
white cliffs of England go down Into a peacock 
sea. And, In the Red Cross dining-room, a poilu, 
his mouth open on a yell of encouragement, 
charges with uplifted hands, looking over his 
shoulder at you with bright daring eyes, and you 
do not need the inscription underneath of ''On 
les auraP^ to guess what spirit urges him. 

This, then, is the setting for one of the most 



REST 107 

merciful of the works of the Red Cross. That It 
is appreciated is shown by the fact that at Christ- 
mas, at this house, with its staff of Superintendent, 
cook, parlourmaid, housemaid and "tweeny," with 
one chauffeuse, there were forty relations of 
wounded staying. The average number of people 
for whom Army and Red Cross rations are drawn 
three times a week is twenty-five, but for these 
rations as for fifteen are drawn, as the food sup- 
ply is too generously proportioned for a house- 
hold consisting so largely of women. But it will 
be seen that with a constantly fluctuating popula- 
tion the task of housekeeping is no easy one, 
though it is tackled by the voluntary staff with 
gaiety and courage. 

They have troubles of &eir own, too, the 
members of that staff, and in the big kitchen, 
where among the dishes on the table a pink hya- 
cinth bloomed, the fair-haired cook I saw so busily 
working was back from a leave in England that 
was to have been her marriage-leave, had not her 
fiance been killed the day before he was to join 
her. Now she Is amongst her pots and pans again 
and smiling still, as I can testify. The "tweeny,'* 
who also describes herself as a boot-boy. Is a 
young war-widow. Things like these are almost 
beyond the admiration of mortals less severely 
tested. 

The material diificulties are not the worst in a 
hostel of this kind, which In Its very nature pre- 



108 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

supposes grief. The relations, of course, are of 
all kinds, after every pattern of humanity, and 
each makes his or her emotional demand, if not 
In active appeal to sympathy, yet in the strain that 
it entails on the sensitively organised to see others 
in sorrow — and unless you are sensitive you are 
no good for work such as this. This hostel Is 
blessed In Its Superintendent, an American V.A.D. 
worker of a personality so simpatica — ^there is no 
adequate English for what I mean — ^that you are 
aware of It at first meeting with her; and she Is a 
woman of the world, which is not always the case 
with women workers, however excellent. 

Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very 
young wife arrived to see her husband, who 
lay desperately ill In one of the hospitals. When 
he died she became as a thing distraught and 
could not be left, and the Superintendent even 
had to have her to sleep In her room with her all 
the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof 
In their sorrow, though it Is none the less tragic 
for that. The first question on the lips of the 
Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking 
the relatives to the hospital is, *'Was it good 
news?" 

It was good news for the couple who arrived 
on the same evening that I did, the mother and 
father of a young officer who was very badly in- 
jured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, 
sitting quietly on either sire of the centre-stove, 



REST 109 

a business man and his wife, as neat, he in his 
serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully 
folded lace and smooth grey hair, as if they had 
not been travelling for a day and a night on end, 
racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep 
lines that the strain had left. He looked at me 
with those patient eyes of the elderly which hold 
the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, 
and talked in a low quiet voice, and It seemed al- 
most an Impertinence of a total stranger to assure 
these gentle, dignified people of her gladness that 
their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that 
any one of these brief contacts In passing should 
be of happiness I It is so impossible not to weep 
with them that weep that It is a keen joy to be 
able to rejoice with them that do rejoice. 

*'It's so free here . . ." he told me, "that's 
what the wife and I like so. No rules and regu- 
lations, you can do just what you like as though 
you were In your own home ... no feeling that 
as you don't pay you've got to do what you're 
told." And there was expressed the spirit of the; 
Hostel as I discovered it. 

There are no rules, and It Is always impressed 
upon the Superintendents that the relations are 
not obliged to go there, that they do so because 
they choose to, and must be treated as honoured 
guests. In the dining-room there are little tables 
as at an hotel, so that the different parties can 
keep to themselves if they prefer It; there are no 



110 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

times for going out or coming in, no times for 
^'lights out," no need to have a meal in if the 
visitor mentions he is going out for it. The rela- 
tions who stay at these hostels are guests in every 
sense of the word, and there is not one trace of 
red tape or the faintest feeling of obligation about 
the whole thing. 

And that must have been what I had felt in the 
very air of the place when I arrived, what stole 
with so precious a balm over me who had been 
in camp after camp, institution after institution. 
This place, with its quiet walls and its grey shut- 
ters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not only 
beautiful and rich with that richness only age can 
give, it was instinct as well with freedom and with 
peace. 



CHAPTER XIII 

GENERAL SERVANTS AND A GENERAL QUE6TI0N 

I HAVE left till the last what to some people 
will be the dullest and what is certainly the least 
spectacular of all the work done by the women 
in France, but what is to me perhaps the most 
wonderful and admirable of all. I mean that of 
the Domestic Staffs. 

For there is something thrilling about driving 
wounded, something eternally picturesque about 
nursing them, but there is no glamour about being 
a general servant. ... A general servant, year 
in, year out, and with no wages at that, for I talk 
of the voluntary staffs, girls of gentle birth and 
breeding who deliberately undertake to wash 
dishes and clean floors and empty slops day after 
day. I think heroism can no higher go, and I 
am not trying to be funny; I mean it. 

All the voluntary camps I had seen, all the 
hostels, the rest stations, and many hospitals, are 
staffed by voluntary domestic help ; and the girls 
they wait upon, the drivers and secretaries and 
such like, are eager in recognition of them. But 
that seems to me about all the recognition they do 

111 



112 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

get; they get no "snappy pars/' no photographs 
in the picture papers, no songs are sung of them, 
no reward is theirs in the shape of medal or rib- 
bon, nothing but the sense of a dish properly 
cleaned or rugs duly swept under. I consider 
that there ought to be a special medal for girls 
who have slaved as general servants during the 
war, without a thrill of romance to support them ; 
a "Skivvy's Ribbon" as one of them laughingly 
suggested to me when I propounded the idea. 

Take, for example, the Headquarters of the 
British Red Cross, at the Hotel Christol at Bou- 
logne, to which I returned on my homeward way, 
as I had come to It on landing. The staff, count- 
ing the Commissioner and officials, the clerks, typ- 
ists, secretaries, and Post Office girls, amount tq 
about a hundred and forty-five people, and the 
house staff number seventeen and are all V.A.D.'s. 
The Hotel Christol Is also the headquarters for 
all Red Cross people going on leave or arriving 
therefrom via Boulogne, and all have to report 
there; nearly all want a meal, many want a bed. 

The men-workers and many of the women, such 
as V.A.D. Commandants, etc., live out In billets 
In the town, but the manageress and her assistant, 
the Post Office Commandant, the girl driver of 
the mail-car with her orderly (these two girls 
drive about sixty miles daily with the mails) , the 
girls of the telephone exchange and the rest of 
the Post Office girls, all "live in," and In addition 



GENERAL SERVANTS 113 

to the casual Red Cross workers who may appeal 
for a bed any time there are the relations of 
wounded who have been put up there whenever 
possible, though now a hostel is being opened in 
Boulogne for the purpose. All the people working 
in the house and all Red Cross workers arriving 
by boat are entitled to take their meals at the 
Christol, as are all Red Cross workers in Bou- 
logne, both officers and privates, and the average 
number of meals served is 2,500 a week. Four 
or five girls act as waitresses in the dining-room, 
and three are always in the pantry, which must 
never be left for a moment during the day; so it 
will be seen that the headquarters of the Red 
Cross is a sort of hotel, except that nobody pays. 

There are French servants to do the roughest 
work, but the girls have plenty to do without that. 
The house staff begin work at seven in the morn- 
ing; at seven-thirty in the evening they start to 
turn out the forty-two offices, which they sweep 
and dust every day. They wash all the tea-things 
(not the dinner-things), and clean all the silver 
and glass, they make the beds and do all the wait- 
ing. A pretty good list of occupations, Is it not, 
carried out on such a huge scale? 

The girls are well looked after, for it must not 
be forgotten that some of them are not more than 
eighteen, and their parents in England have a 
right to demand that these children should be at 
once guarded and cheered. No Red Cross girl 



lU THE SWORD OF. DEBORAH 

is allowed out after half-past nine in at fesfaurant, 
and none is ever allowed to dine out unaccompa- 
nied by another girl. But when a friend of a girl 
passes through Boulogne, then it is permitted that 
she and another girl may go and dine with the 
officer in question, always provided they are back 
by nine-thirty. For superiors are merciful and 
human creatures these days, and there is always 
the thought that the girl may never see that friend 
again. And Heaven — and the superior — ^knows 
that these girls need and deserve a little relaxa- 
tion and enjoyment* 

And would you not think that to girls who work 
as these do and behave so well would at least be 
given the understanding and respect of all of us 
who do so much less? Yet how often one hears 
careless remarks of censure or — ^worse — of be- 
littlement. That to other nations our ways may 
need explaining is understandable, but we should 
indeed be ashamed that any amongst ourselves 
fail in comprehension. 

iWhat do the French think of our women? 
That IS a question that inevitably arises in the 
mind of anyone who knows the differences in 
French and English education. Let me show the 
thing as I think it is, by means of a metaphor. 

It is universally conceded that marriage is a 
more difficult proposition than friendship, that it 
is more a test of affection to live under one roof 
and share the daily commonplaces of life than 



GENERAL SERVANTS 115 

it IS to meet occasionally when one cart make a 
feast of the meeting. Yet this is not to say that 
marriage is the less admirable state, but only to 
allow that it is one requiring greater sacrifices, 
greater tact, and — greater affection. Therefore, 
when it is admitted that the presence in France for 
nearly four years of English soldiers, English 
civilians on war-work, and the consequent erection 
of whole temporary townships for their accommo- 
dation, is a greater test — if you will a greater 
strain — for the Entente than if intercourse had 
been limited to an occasional interchange of a 
handful of people, one is not saying anything de- 
rogatory either to French hosts or English guests, 
but merely frankly conceding that more depth of 
affection and understanding is necessary than 
would otherwise have been the case. To super- 
ficial relationships, superficial knowledge, but to 
the big partnerships of life, complete understand- 
ing. And, if that is never quite possible in this 
world, at least let the corner where knowledge 
cannot come be filled by tolerance. 

England is no longer on terms of mere friendly 
intercourse with France ; the bond is deeper, more 
indissoluble. . . . And as in marriage the closest 
bond of all is the birth of children, so in this 
pact of nations the greatest bond is the loss of 
children — lost for the saipe cause upon the same 
soil. . • • 

With a bond as deep as this — a bond always 



116 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

acknowledged atid given Its meed of recognition 
by the most thoughtful brains and sensitive hearts 
—yet, as in marriage, there are bound to be minor 
irritations, points, not of meeting, but of con- 
flict. Trifles, Indeed, these points, compared with 
the magnitude of the bond which unites, but never- 
theless trifles which would be better adjusted than 
Ignored. 

In the first place, we must recognise that though 
the things which unite us, our common Ideals, our 
common needs, are far stronger than any differ- 
ence In our modes of thought, yet those differ- 
ences exist, and that. In marriage. It Is often said 
that It is the little things which count. . . . Heav- 
en forbid that we should so lose sense of propor- 
tion as to say It when the matter In hand Is the 
marriage of nations, but nevertheless it is well not 
entirely to forget It. . . . And, of all the dif- 
ferences In customs between us, there Is probably 
none more marked than In our way of treating 
what Is known — loosely and with considerable 
banality — as the * 'sex-problem.'* This Is not the 
place to discuss those differences, though, as one 
who has known and loved France all her life, I 
may mention that, personally, I see much to ad- 
mire In the French system and could wish that 
we emulated it, but that Is neither here nor there 
at the moment. 

France has probably evolved for the happiness 
and welfare of her womenkind the sort of life 



GENERAL SERVANTS IIT 

which suits best with their temperament and cir- 
cumstances. Women, like water, find their own 
level, and no one who knows France, and knows 
the devotion, the business capacity, and the good 
works of her women, imagines them to be the but- 
terfly creatures that English fancy used to paint 
them twenty or thirty years ago. As a matter of 
fact, the present writer had occasion, two winters 
ago, to make a close study of the varied scope of 
women's work in France — -the hospitals for train- 
ing of femmes du monde^ the schools like Le 
Foyer, for the training of young girls of the upper 
classes to help their poorer sisters, etc., etc., all 
works carried on unostentatiously long before the 
war broke upon us and proved their usefulness. 
The ^'butterfly" Frenchwoman underwent, before 
the war, a far more serious social training than 
did the happy-go-lucky English girl, and was bet- 
ter equipped in consequence, with a knowledge of 
economic conditions, than the untrained English- 
woman could be. 

But we too have our quality, and I rather think 
it IS to be found In the greater freedom which we 
are allowed. We were not so well trained, but 
freedom stepped into the place of custom, and 
gave the necessary attitude of mind — ^that unpre- 
judiced, untrammelled attitude which Is essential 
to the quick grasping of a fresh metier. That Is 
where our method — or, if you prefer it, our lack 
of method — helped us, even as their training 



118 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

helped the French. And the French, with their 
extraordinary facility of vision, do, I think, un- 
derstand that we have simply pushed our freedom 
to its logical and legitimate outcome, that we could 
not be expected, after being accustomed, for many 
years past, to be on terms of simple easy friend- 
ship with men as with our own sex, above all, after 
working side by side with them since this war be- 
gan, we could not be expected to say that we could 
not work with them in France, though we could 
in England, or that perhaps this girl would, and 
that girl couldn't. ... 

' We naturally proceeded to act en masse as we 
had acted individually, to do on a large scale 
what had been done on a small, to manipulate 
great bodies of women where before a few friends 
had worked together. In every large body of per- 
sons there are bound to be one or two individuals 
who fail to come up to the required standard, but 
that does not alter the principle that what can 
safely be done in small quantities can safely be 
done in large, provided the conditions are altered 
to scale. 

' And that is what we are doing, and what our 
Government is helping us to do ; that is what our 
Women's Army and our voluntary workers in 
France are^ — the expression, on a large scale, of 
what bands of women have been doing so suc- 
cessfully on a small scale since the beginning of 
«the war — helping, and even replacing the men. 



GENERAL SERVANTS 119 

And just as, with our peculiar training and mode 
of thought, It Is possible for the average English- 
woman to eliminate sex as a factor in the scheme 
of things, so It Is possible to eliminate It In greater 
masses. In other words, it is perfectly possible, 
to men and girls brought up with the English 
method of free friendly intercourse, to work side 
by side, to meet, to walk together, and to remain 
— merely friends. Whether that is a good thing 
or not is another point altogether, as it Is whether 
It makes for charm in a woman. . . . Certainly 
no woman in this world competes with a French- 
woman for charm. It is as recognised as an Eng- 
lishwoman's complexion — and considerably moire 
lasting 1 

Probably it is only ourselves and the Ameri- 
cans among the races of the world who could have 
instituted such an experiment as that of our Wom- 
en's Army, but there is among the nations one. 
which is supreme in *'flalr," in sympathy, and a, 
certain ability to comprehend intellectually what 
it might not understand emotionally, and that na- 
tion is France. 

I am confident that it will never have to bd said, 
that when Englishwomen sacrificed so much — and 
to a Frenchwoman one does not need to point 
out what a sacrifice it is when a woman risks youth? 
and looks in hard unceasing work — ^^that French-, 
women failed to understand them or to attribute' 
motives to them other than those that have ani- 



120 fTHE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

mated themselves In their own labours through- 
out the war. 

That it must sometimes look odd to them one 
knows so well; how can it be otherwise? They 
see the girls, khaki-clad, out walking without 
^'Tommies," hear the sounds of music and danc- 
ing coming from the recreation huts, where the 
girls are allowed to Invite the men, and vice versa. 
Yet, If you Investigate, you will fin^ out that they 
are of an extraordinary simplicity, these girls and 
men, In their Intercourse, In their earnest dancing, 
taught them by Instructors from our Young Men's 
Christian Association, Inspired by nothing more 
heady than lemonade, and chaperoned by the 
women-officers, who have attained a mixture of 
authority and motherly supervision over every In- 
dividual girl that reminds me of nothing so much 
as the care, born of a sort of divine cunning, of a 
very dear and clever Mother Superior at a con- 
vent I once stayed at In France. For the Interest- 
ing point for both the French and ourselves to 
note Is that In the treatment of our Women's 
Army In France we have taken a leaf out of their 
book. We look after the girls with something 
of that love and care which surrounds a girl in 
France. 

For many of the Women's Army are working 
girls, who have never been guarded in their lives, 
whose parents had probably, after the lower-class 
English way, very little influence with them, and 



GENERAL SERVANTS 121 

who, though good, honest, rough girls, were free 
to roam the streets of their native towns with 
their friends every evening once their work was 
over. Now, for what is for many of them the 
first time in their lives, they are being watched 
and guarded in a manner that is more French 
than English, and which I find admirable. As for 
their walks, their friendships with men, the per- 
sonal observation of the acute French will show 
them that it Is merely our Anglo-Saxon way, and 
the official statistics will prove to any doubters 
how well both the girls and the men can be trusted 
to behave themselves. We are a cold nation if 
you like, but there it is — it has its excellences, 
if not Its charms. 

So much for fundamental differences, which, 
when Intelligence and sympathy go out to meet 
them, become merely points on which tempera- 
ments agree to differ amicably, each giving its 
meed of admiration to the other. And for minor 
matters, little things of different customs only, 
that nevertheless, occasionally, in the strain of 
this war, ruffle even friends, I would say some- 
thing like this, which Is In the hearts of us all . . . 

France — dear lovely France, to so many of us 
adored for many years, who has stood to us for 
the romance of the world, we know that In many 
things our ways are not your ways and never will 
be, nor would we wish It otherwise. To each na- 
tion her distinctiveness, or she loses her soul. 



in J'HE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

But, when those ways of ours seem to you most 
alien, say to yourself: "This is only England^s 
differing way of doing what we are doing, of fight- 
ing for what we are fighting for — ^the saving of 
the right to individualism, the right to be differ- 
ent. * • ." To gain that we are all having to be- 
come alike, just as to win freedom we are having 
for a time to give it up, and the great thing to re- 
member is that this terrible coherent community 
life IS being borne with only that eventually we 
may all be free men once more. Let us, for all 
time, differ In our own ways, rather than agree 
in the German I But also let us, while differing, 
understand. 



CHAPTER XI^ 

NOTES; AN1> (QUERIEgf 

On my last evening I sat and tKbugHt about 
the girls I had seen and known, in greater and less 
degrees, in passing. And I saw them, not as un- 
thinking "sporting" young things, who were hav- 
ing a great adventure, but as girls who were 
steadily sticking to their jobs, often without en- 
joyment save that of knowledge of good work 
well done. And I thought of those prophets who 
gloomily foretell that the women will never want 
to drop into the background again — forgetful 
of the fact that where a woman Is is never a back- 
ground to herself. I smiled as I thought of the 
eagerness with which these hard workers in mud 
and snow and heat will start buying pretty clothes 
again and going out to parties . . . and I was 
very thankful to know liow unchangedly woman 
they had all remained, in spite of the fact that they 
had had the strength to lay the privileges and the 
fun of being a woman aside for a time, 

I remembered what the D. of T. had said to 
me when we discussed the question of how the 
girls would settle down when it was all over^ and 

123 



IM THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

how he had thought that even If they did not 
marry all would be well, because they would have 
had their adventure. ... I remembered too how 
that had seemed to me the correct answer at the 
time. Then later, when that awful web of de- 
pression caught me, and the horror of the school- 
girl conditions of life and all the apparent 
''brightness" had choked me, I had all the more 
thought It true, but marvelled; later still, when 
I caught glimpses of that wonderful spirit and 
that deep sophistication which had so cheered me, 
I reversed the whole judgment and thought there 
was nothing In It. 

Now, thinking It all over. It seemed to me that 
somewhere midway lay Truth. These girls have 
had, in a certain sense, their adventure, but when 
It Is all over, they will have a reaction from It, 
and I believe that reaction will be pleasant to 
them, that It will be the reaction, and not the 
memory of adventure, which will content them. 
It Is certain that to anyone who has worked as 
these girls work a considerable period of doing 
nothing In particular will be very acceptable. 
They will all have to become themselves again, 
which will be Interesting. . . • 

Dear, wonderful girls . . . you who wash 
dishes and scrub and sweep, you girls of the 
Women's Army who replace men and who do It 
so thoroughly, you drivers who are out In all 
weathers, night and day, sometimes for a week 



NOTES AND QUERIES 125 

or more on end, who face hardships such as 

were faced In those three weeks at T when 

there were no fires and no water, how glad I 
am to have met you. ... So I sat and thought, 
and then I picked up a copy of The Times which 
had just come over. And in the "Personal" col- 
umn this caught my eye : 

"Lady wants war-work, preferably motor-driv- 
ing, from three to five p.m.'* 

And I saw that It was not only those far re- 
moved from the war who misunderstood both what 
It demands and that which has arisen to meet 
those demands. 

Do we not nearly all fall to realise the magni- 
tude and Import of what Is being done by these 
unspectacular workers behind the lines, who are 
yet part of war Itself, and dally and nightly 
strengthen the hands of the fighters? Some of us 
In England realise as little as you In far-off coun- 
tries, and yet It should be our business to know, 
because the least we can do Is to understand so 
that we, In our much less fine way, can help them 
a little, one tithe of the amount they help our 
fighting men. 

Not because of any desire of theirs for praise 
Is It necessary — I never saw a healthier disregard, 
amounting to a kindly contempt, for what those 
at home think or don't think, than among the 
women working In France — ^but because It Is only 
by knowing that we can respond generously 



126 THE SWORD OF DEBORAH 

enough to the needs of their work, and only by 
understanding that we can save our own souls 
from that fat and contented ignorance which In- 
duces a sleep uncommonly like death. 

Nor, as long as we listen to the girls themselves, 
are we in any danger of thinking too much of them 
or of their work. Not a woman I met, English or 
American, working In France, but said something 
like this, and meant it: "What, after all, Is any- 
thing we can do, except inasmuch as It may help 
the men a little? How could we bear to do noth- 
ing when the men are doing the most wonderful 
thing that has ever been done in the world?" 



THE END 



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